At 09:44 AM 10/23/00 -0700, Larry Wall wrote: >David L. Nicol writes: >: Steve Fink wrote (and I edited slightly): >: >: > <groan> I can't figure out why so many people misinterpret my RFC12 >: > as requiring a solution to the halting problem. >: >: a large class of incompletely expressed >: suggestions appear to get grouped into >: >: "This requires solving the halting problem!" >: >: without providing further explanation. > >Well, in my case, I wasn't actually meaning it strictly. Sorry for the >imprecision--it's hard to squeeze everything into a talk. To me the >saying is just shorthand for "potentially sufficiently computationally >expensive that I don't want to worry about it for the default case". >In other words, I was lumping polynomial in with exponential, and RFC12 >feels polynomial to me. And it's not that I'm against the availability >of polynomial algorithms in the parser, or the use of polynomial >algorithms in general--I just think the default compile-and-run parser >should avoid them. I'm really hoping to make allowances for a variety of optional optimizations. We can save the nastier things (and with perl's active data, a lot of stuff could reasonably be classed as difficult--good optimization's going to need fairly complex flow analysis, I think) for explicit requests, possibly with different default optimization levels for parse-and-go perl and compile-to-bytecode perl. Dan --------------------------------------"it's like this"------------------- Dan Sugalski even samurai dan@sidhe.org have teddy bears and even teddy bears get drunkThread Previous | Thread Next