Re: Uniform vectors: was Questions about floating numbers

[Dirk Herrmann]

On Wed, 10 Oct 2001, Keith Wright wrote:

> > > Why do we need eleven different prefix letters for different types of
> > > uniform vector anyway?  Is there not an stunning algorithm that,
> > > given a _single_ code for uniform-array and a list of objects all
> > > of the same type, computes the common type?  So #u(#t #t #f #t)
> > > is a bit vector and #u(3.14 2.71) is floating point.
> > 
> > Note that there is already a SRFI about that issue, and IMO the right
> > thing would be to adopt those ideas.
> 
> That would be srfi-4, but note also its anti-srfi, srfi-10, which
> proposes a more general syntax.  I find srfi-4 to be unpleasantly
> full of special cases while missing e.g. bit vectors.  Why should
> there be a special TAGvector-ref for each type of vector, instead
> of just letting vector-ref, or at worst uniform-vector-ref, check
> the type of its argument?  Anti-virtualization!

True.  But, instead of providing our own set of uniform vector syntaxes
again - and running into compatibility problems later - it is wise to see
which #<letter> combinations are already taken.

And, given srfi-10, there is no need for a new syntax for uniform vectors
at all.

> > Virtualizing, BTW, is an implementation technique - in some sense.  The
> > term comes (at least that's what I assume) from the concept of virtual
> > functions in C++.
> 
> Maybe it's named after the Virtual File System in the Linux kernel,
> which is done this way.  The word "virtual" has been applied to
> many different computery things since at least the sixties.

Somehow I feel there's a ':-)' missing in there...

Best regards
Dirk Herrmann