Re: [MIT-Scheme-devel] changes to primitive definitions

[Joe Marshall]

I understand.  I'll revert that.

On Sat, Sep 5, 2009 at 3:49 PM, Chris Hanson<address@hidden> wrote:
> Don't do this.  It's very important for compiled code that these
> primitives be wrapped in Scheme code.  This allows the compiler to
> open-code them in place, so things like (map car ...) work well.
>
> If this is a problem for your interpreter, we'll have to find another 
> solution.
>
> On Sat, Sep 5, 2009 at 3:14 PM, Taylor R Campbell<address@hidden> wrote:
>> You changed DEFINE-PRIMITIVES and a number of primitive definitions in
>> the run-time system to eta-reduce them.  I presume that this makes the
>> system run faster on your C# interpreter, but conversely, Chris had
>> made the opposite change about a year ago in order to make the system
>> run faster when compiled, because if the primitive is open-coded, as
>> most of them are, then the compiled procedure is much faster to call
>> from compiled code than the primitive procedure.  While I appreciate
>> that you'd like the system to run faster on your C# interpreter, I
>> suspect that even with the eta-reduced primitives, it's much slower
>> than compiled code, so personally I think I'd prefer the eta-expanded
>> definitions.
>>
>> There's also a separate issue of which form is more documentative.  By
>> eta-reducing the definitions, M-A in Edwin will generally show the
>> primitive's documentation, including its parameter list as described
>> in the microcode -- if the primitive's microcode definition was
>> written with a documentation string.  Eta-expanding the definitions
>> with generated names makes M-A a little less useful for case when
>> documentation was available, but maybe we could make DEFINE-PRIMITIVES
>> generate parameter lists from the primitives' documentation strings if
>> available.  On the other hand, using DEFINE-PRIMITIVES at all makes
>> life hard for grep and tags, silly as those may be.
>>
>>
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>



-- 
~jrm