On Fri, Mar 14, 2008 at 5:30 PM, Wolfgang Jeltsch <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> 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 > _______________________________________________ Haskell-Cafe mailing list Haskell-Cafe@haskell.org http://www.haskell.org/mailman/listinfo/haskell-cafe
