Re: Tail call elimination

[Daniel Herring]

Hi Pete,

My objections to GMP:

- major added dependency (Make needs to be widely portable, and it is 
often part of a boot-strapping procedure.  The core functionality needs to 
be trim.  Heavy lifting needs to be separable.)

- slow (native int32 is much faster)

- massive YAGNI (Make is a build system, not a general-purpose computing 
platform)

Later,
Daniel



On Wed, 20 May 2020, Pete Dietl wrote:

> I really like the idea of using GMP to do the math.
> Does it make sense to restrict ourselves to integer only? Probably,
> but just a thought. Could always introduce it later.
> Yes there is the question of use case and YAGNI, but there's also the
> case of why artificially restrict the abilities of $(expr).
>
> Assuming we at least do GMP with integers, I want to know the
> operators that we should support.
> I propose:
>
> Arithmetic Functions:
> ---------------------------
> * add
> * subtract
> * multiply
> * divide
> * negate
> * absolute value
> * exponentiate
>
> Bit Manipulation:
> ----------------------
> * and
> * or
> * xor
> * complement
> * left shift
> * right shift
>
> Comparison Functions:
> ------------------------------
> * >
> * >=
> * <
> * <=
> * ==
>
> If this looks ok then I can proceed with making a proposal document.
> I can format it to resemble a Make documentation page.