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Re: [Gcl-devel] Calling for top ten ANSI issues ...


From: Paul F. Dietz
Subject: Re: [Gcl-devel] Calling for top ten ANSI issues ...
Date: Mon, 22 Sep 2003 16:27:06 -0500
User-agent: Mozilla/5.0 (X11; U; Linux i686; en-US; rv:1.2.1) Gecko/20030225

Camm Maguire wrote:

OK, I've put in code (not yet committed) in subtypep to coerce symbols
to the class they may name if possible, and resolve the subtype
relationship according to the class precedence list, i.e. just as
subtypep handles class object arguments at present.

A few type/class questions:

1) I'm assuming from what I read that the above logic is valid.
2) I'm assuming that there is no analogous logic I can use to process
        subtypep relationships between instances of classes
3) Our subtypep function really needs help.  Its mostly a list of
        one-off relationships at present.  Do you know of a more
        elegant algorithm, likely recursive, to handle non-class type
        relationships in subtypep in a more robust fashion?


Getting SUBTYPEP to work well was a lot of work for the SBCL/CMUCL
developers (the test cases showed up lots of problems there.)

Baker has an algorithm from the early 1990s that does well, *except*
on CONS types (where it can take exponential time; the compound CONS
type was added to the Common Lisp standard shortly after Baker wrote
this paper.)  ECL uses this algorithm.

The exponential cases all have and/or/not in them somewhere,
though, so it's ok to give up when you see those.  This is an area
where standards compliance allows the implementation to get away with
doing very little.  There are many tests in the test suite on subtypep
that can be passed by either successfully computing the subtypep relationship
or by failing (returning NIL NIL).

        Paul





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