Jussi Piitulainen <xxxxxx@ling.helsinki.fi> writes:
> David Rush writes:
> > Jussi Piitulainen writes:
> >> Brad Lucier writes:
> >>> Both assume that there are underlying arrays that are mutable, you
> >>> can set! elements of the arrays, the underlying arrays are generic
> >>> containers (vectors, not f64vectors or f32vectors, ...), etc.
> >
> > I don't see this depth of assumptions. Brad seems to be bringing up
> > two orthogonal issues:
> >
> >         1) mutability
> >         2) type-safety
>
> I thought people want restricted vector types for space efficiency,
> rather than type safety.

Well, it turns out to be the same thing at the end of the
implementation.

> > categorically-standard spec. Err...internal jargon that: I'm looking
> > for a spec that I can plug-n-play alternate implementations for
> > specific problems. e.g. I'm working (low prio) on some large, sparse
> > matrix code for doing latent semantic indexing tricks. My arrays are
> > *not* going to be writable, but I don't care much because I won't be
> > writing to them.
>
> This is definitely interesting. Perhaps it would be better to separate
> index arithmetic from backing vectors entirely? The nature of the
> package would change rather a lot - quite possibly to the better.

I had the impression that we were mostly there right now. Or have you
not added the index-object interfaces in the new revision? I could be
seriously confused at this point.

> Where do your sparse matrices come from if not from something like
> make-array?

Well that's the point: they come from something *like* make-arry, but
not make-array itself. Specifically, in emulating the behaviour of the
SVDPACK library, the array data comes in from a specific file
format. I'll store that in some tree-structure and implement a version
of array-ref which knows how to walk that structure, returning 0 for
empty entries.

The point is that there should be no explicit dependence in the API on
a particular implementation strategy. I don't think that any exists
right now (except possibly using arrays themselves as the index
objects to arrrays).

david rush
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