[GiNaC-devel] (no subject)

[Chris Dams]

Dear Jens,

On Wed, 21 Jun 2006, Jens Vollinga wrote:

> this compile-thingy is unfinished business of course. It is my (bad?) 
> habit of putting even buggy or not-documented code into CVS, so that 
> other developers may ponder about it. :-) I am slow on documenting 
> features, but in this case I left that task open on purpose. I didn't 
> want any user to use that feature yet! The interface is bad. The 
> function pointer should be a return parameter. And there are other 
> smaller issues. While thinking about these (yes, small) changes, I was 
> carried away by its connection to The Big Picture (tm). There are 
> functions in GiNaC that don't have an equivalent in libc. Extra code has 
> to be produced and somehow included in the C file to be compiled. Time 
> consuming  subexpressions should only be evaluated once, but how can one 
> tell how expensive a certain evaluation is? Only possible if functions 
> can be asked for such information. So, the function system needed some 
> attention. Fixes there relied on a change in the type info system ...
> 
> I will not have time to fix it soon (I even didn't do much for the 
> pseries changes I announced LOUD and proudly, yet!). So, if this code 
> stands in the way of a next GiNaC release I would more likely remove it 
> from CVS temporarily. On the other hand, if you have interest in this 
> feature please feel free to take it into your hands.

Well, you seem to be the one doing the releasing of new versions lately,
so who am I to complain if you decide to make that task more difficult by
committing and having to remove again some immature/unfinished code. ;-o
As long as the CVS-version remains compilable... Sending an email to this
list about major changes in CVS would not be such a bad idea, though.

I just looked at it because I noticed something new in the source tree and
started wondering what it was about. At the moment I am not that much
interested in this kind of stuff. Maybe if I need to do some Monte Carlo
integration at some point.

Best wishes,
Chris