[Haskell-cafe] Re: Implementing fixed-sized vectors (using datatype algebra?)

[Alfonso Acosta]

On Fri, Mar 14, 2008 at 5:30 PM, Wolfgang Jeltsch
<g9ks157k at acme.softbase.org> wrote:
>  I have a feedback from my Grapefruit co-developer about those aliases in the
>  type-level package.  He told me that on his machine, building this package
>  took about 15 minutes, obviously because the machine ran out of RAM.  He also
>  told me that the generated object code was very large, and that loading the
>  documentation page generated by Haddock took very long.

Fair point, it akes quite some time in my machine too (not 15minutes though)

>  And he made a very good point: Who needs aliases for *all* numbers until, say,
>  10000?  Who needs to hard-code the vector length 8247 in his code?

If I remember correctly aliases are generated until decimal 5000,
which might me really long anyway.

> I think
>  that in practice, you only need very few numbers hard-coded.  So it might be
>  better to export a function for letting the package user generate the
>  necessary aliases himself.
>
>  I even think that it is probably sensible to drop the alias thing completely,
>  at least if you have vector lengths in mind.  What vector lengths will appear
>  as fixed in a real world program?  1000?  I think, usually you have only
>  sizes like 2 or 3 hard-coded, for vectors in the mathematical sense.  And
>  their representation is already very short: D2, D3, …  Remember that computed
>  numbers are not shown as aliases in error messages, only numbers that
>  directly appear in your code.
>
>  My co-author also mentioned that he doesn't see much use for octal and
>  hexadecimal notation.
>
>  So I propose to drop alias support from type-level or at least let the package
>  user do the necessary generation.
>

I think that removing aliases completely is not a good idea. How about
generating much lower aliases for decimals (lets say until 1000),
droping the other bases, and exporting a function to extended the
alias range at will? (that function could perfectly include the other
bases as well). Something called extendAliases would do.


I don't have the time to work on it now, but if you send me a patch
I'd be happy to apply it. It should be something simple to do. All the
Template Haskell machinery is already coded.




>  > […]
>
>  Best wishes,
>  Wolfgang
>