On Wed, Jul 17, 2002 at 11:13:58PM +0100, Nicholas Clark wrote: > On Wed, Jul 17, 2002 at 10:38:47PM +0100, Dave Mitchell wrote: > > One of the reasons I used numerical accuracy as an example was because > > in Perl 5, Nick's mini-essay on his stirling work *is* buried somewhere > > in the middle of the 10,000 line sv.c, and thus probably hasn't been seen > > by most people. If there was a .dev file, it would (hopefully) become a > > well-known starting point and thus things in it would more likely be > > drawn to the attention of the reader earlier. > > Hmm. But you're right too. I want them in both places. > Well, more accurately, I think I'd agree that the overview documentation > deserves not to be in sv.c, but all the "don't do this here" or "you don't > need to worry about that here" stay inline. I *think* that means I'd like > comments such as this: > > /* IV not precise. No need to convert from PV, as NV > conversion would already have cached IV if it detected > that PV->IV would be better than PV->NV->IV > flags already correct - don't set public IOK. */ > > to stay where they are, but the description (and health warning) maybe > should come out.
Yep, that sounds about right. People would learn from the .dev file about your overall strategy to keep values as 64-bit ints for as long as possible, then could learn about the individual gruesome hacks^w^w cunning manipulations near the individual functions. > I guess the distinction should be that in perl5, sv.c > does lots of things, and that description needs to stay together with the > numeric conversion code. If the numeric conversion code got to live in its > own file, then sv_convert.c and sv_convert.dev would make sense, as it > ought to be obvious to anyone fundamentally chaining sv_convert.c that they > had better look at and correct sv_convert.dev > > It's just that as is, perl5's sv.dev would have essays on SV allocation > strategies, SV copying routines, SV number conversion, SV string conversion, > SV setting routines (there are a lot of variants of these), magic, recycling > unused SVs, SV string comparison, sv_gets, sprintf and cloning. And that > list may not be complete. I had no idea so much was in there. But better for there to be 15 essays than no essays :-) -- "Do not dabble in paradox, Edward, it puts you in danger of fortuitous wit." Lady Croom - Arcadia
