On Thu, 24 May 2001, Ken Williams wrote:
> [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Simon Cozens) wrote:
>
> >On Thu, May 24, 2001 at 11:49:22AM -0400, William Thompson wrote:
> >> While I hesitate to step into what seems like a religious war
> >
> >I'm the list admin, so I guess it's my job to step into a religious war. :)
> >
> >Guys, can we move the advocacy to [EMAIL PROTECTED] where it belongs? If
> >what you're posting is *really* about the suitability of Perl for AI,
> >then feel free to post it, but if it ain't, it shouldn't be here.
>
> I've been reading these threads with a vague interest, and it seems to
> me that if there's any consensus (which there may not be) it's that Perl
> is fun for many AI tasks but not necessarily efficient for the heavy
> lifting.
>
> So why don't we do something about it? We would do well to look at
> things like PDL, the creaters of which observed that Perl wasn't very
> good at large n-dimensional array storage & computation, so they tried
> to fix it. I suggest that we either harness modules like that, or
> identify some problems that are worth solving and solve them.
>
>
> ------------------- -------------------
> Ken Williams Last Bastion of Euclidity
> [EMAIL PROTECTED] The Math Forum
>
One of Perl's greatest strengths is that it is a glue language. Perl plays
very nicely with C, and is itself written in C. If there is some bit
twiddling to do, and you implement it in C. Many of the core modules are
in C, so it should be safe religiously.
So, what is really needed in the area of Perl AI and GA/GP is for CPAN to
have a robust set of modules implemented in C, with implementations for
all of the common algorithms. Sadly there are only a few things there.
Then we will set up some benchmarks. ;)
--
Paris
