Douglas Roberts wrote:
To some, I suppose lack of efficiency and the ability to implement
pure, faithful representations of the physical system being modeled
are positive attributes of a language.
Therefore, 100% faithfulness of representation of the physical system
is not only not needed, it can get in the way of producing results.
There's faithful in the sense of simulating things that aren't relevant
to a model, and then there's faithful in the sense of thinking things
through. Doing the latter needn't get in the way of efficiency, it can
actually facilitate it. In the assisted suicide example, a garbage
collector is in the best position to determine who has references to an
object that is being removed. Without that support, ad-hoc mechanisms
to overwrite dead objects with death signatures would be needed (while
keeping enough of its memory around for the signature pattern),
otherwise there'd be invalid pointers in the simulation after the object
was deallocated.
IMO, research often does get in the way of production work, and vice
versa.
Marcus
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