Re: MATLAB

[Dan Sugalski <address@hidden>]

At 09:09 PM 12/10/2001 -0800, Morgan McGuire wrote:
> > Under what circumstances should a language implementor *not* use
> > copy-on-mutate?  Where's the cost?
>
>Any lazy evaluation has a wierd impact on performance... the net
>performance is always as good or better than eager evaluation but it
>happens at different times.  This makes profiling a mess and can be
>tricky for real-time applications.  Most scripting people don't care
>about either.
>
>Some lazy schemes have issues with side effects (especially errors and
>exceptions!) happening at unpredictable times, but with copying you're
>safe... no side effects should occur (unless you have copy
>constructors, but that's a whole other mess).

Side-effects are the only reason I'm not going wild with full laziness in 
the parrot engine. (Perl, alas, is sometimes almost entirely side-effects)

I'd really, *really* love to be able to have someone have a program that is 
exactly this:

    @some_array = (1..1000000, bar());
    print "Hi\n";

and never actually call bar, nor construct the million element list of 
integers from 1 to 1000000. Not doing things is generally faster than doing 
things, at least in my experience. :)

					Dan

--------------------------------------"it's like this"-------------------
Dan Sugalski                          even samurai
dan@sidhe.org                         have teddy bears and even
                                      teddy bears get drunk