Dear Julia colleagues, I heard about Julia on Tuesday from Alan Edelman at a meeting in Belgium, and I am possibly interested in developing software in Julia, specifically, finite element mesh generation. I've read the documentation and have a few beginner questions that I hope this newsgroup can answer easily. For the sake of threading, I'm splitting my questions over this and my next three postings. Thank you very much in advance for your help.
Questions about immutable: It is important for efficiency that I have the possibility of laying out arrays of structs in memory one after the other (i.e., without a level of indirection for each item in the array). My reading of the documentation suggests that indeed the structs will be laid out in consecutive memory locations provided the struct is declared 'immutable'. Is this correct? Why is the example of rational numbers in the docs not declared immutable? If it is not declared immutable, does this mean that an array of rational numbers is actually an array of pointers to rational numbers? Are tuples stored via pointers or as consecutive structs? The docs don't seem to say. How can I determine on-the-fly whether my array is composed of structs or pointers? I suppose that it is possible with timing tests, but is there a more direct way to check? Thanks, Steve Vavasis
