From: Tuomo Keskitalo <Tuomo.Keskitalo@iki.fi>
To: Brian Gough <bjg@gnu.org>, Gerard Jungman <jungman@lanl.gov>,
gsl-discuss@sourceware.org
Subject: Re: containers tentative design summary
Date: Sun, 15 Nov 2009 09:13:00 -0000 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <4AFFC617.9050707@iki.fi> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <87tywxtbf4.wl%bjg@network-theory.co.uk>
Hello,
On 11/14/2009 04:42 PM, Brian Gough wrote:
> At Mon, 09 Nov 2009 16:07:43 -0700,
> Gerard Jungman wrote:
>> On Fri, 2009-11-06 at 14:42 +0000, Brian Gough wrote:
>>> Ok, I have read the paper now. I do think the practice of casting
>>> described there is rather dated. When people had no viable
>>> alternative to C, they had to resort to such tricks. It is not
>>> something that should be encouraged today -- programs should either be
>>> written safely, following the rules of type-checking in C, or be
>>> written in another language.
>
> From 1.3 million lines of code they describe only one method which
> does not use casts, which is the one we use. I don't think we are
> going to find anything that is better than the current method for
> views.
Apparently this is a fundamental question.
Currently GSL uses C in a type-safe manner which forces somewhat
complicated APIs for everyone but enables users to find some lethal
bugs. More user-friendly APIs would allow people to silently break their
programs if they are not careful. And there is no compromise. Does this
summarize the situation?
I am sure there are users for both approaches. I don't know.. Maybe GSL
should be the safe, strict library, and there should be another
scientific library in C which aims towards interoperability between
data, libraries and languages? This would split forces, but both
projects would also benefit from each other.
Anyway, I am interested to see what Gerard comes up with.
--
Tuomo.Keskitalo@iki.fi
http://iki.fi/tuomo.keskitalo
next prev parent reply other threads:[~2009-11-15 9:13 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 23+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2009-11-03 19:44 Gerard Jungman
2009-11-09 20:41 ` Brian Gough
2009-11-09 23:06 ` Gerard Jungman
2009-11-14 15:25 ` Brian Gough
2009-11-15 9:13 ` Tuomo Keskitalo [this message]
2009-11-15 16:44 ` Jonathan Underwood
2009-11-15 18:41 ` Robert G. Brown
2009-11-16 11:56 ` Brian Gough
-- strict thread matches above, loose matches on Subject: below --
2009-11-20 9:37 Justin Lenzo
2009-10-05 10:12 Gerard Jungman
2009-10-05 14:50 ` James Bergstra
2009-10-05 23:00 ` Gerard Jungman
2009-10-05 23:45 ` James Bergstra
2009-10-06 19:59 ` Gerard Jungman
[not found] ` <645d17210910060537s762d6323pfd2bec8590ad28e9@mail.gmail.com>
2009-10-06 20:02 ` Gerard Jungman
2009-10-23 21:28 ` Brian Gough
2009-10-27 23:06 ` Gerard Jungman
[not found] ` <7f1eaee30910271628h70785125m68e47c7a7b5c25b7@mail.gmail.com>
2009-10-27 23:49 ` Gerard Jungman
2009-10-29 18:06 ` Brian Gough
2009-10-29 20:41 ` Gerard Jungman
2009-10-29 21:40 ` James Bergstra
2009-10-30 16:54 ` Brian Gough
2009-10-30 16:54 ` Brian Gough
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