On 11/29/06, Raymond Toy <raymond.toy at ericsson.com> wrote:
> Is zabs the bottleneck in some real application that you have? If
> not, then I care much less about it. :-)
Yes, same here.
> I'm not sure there's any policy on Fortran, other than it was a way of
> using well-known, proven algorithms with maxima.
Agreed.
> The intent was not that you read and modify the translated Lisp, much
> like you normally don't read and modify the assembly output from gcc.
> If you find issues, you're supposed to fix the Fortran code.
Yes, I think that is the best approach.
> CFFI and friends is out of the question right now since there is no
> CFFI for gcl. (AFAIK). But that's my opinion. There are probably
> differing opinions on this matter.
For my part, I am in agreement here. The CFFI web site states that
the GCL port is broken. When they get it working, then we can
reconsider FFI.
> I have often thought about hand-translating the Fortran to Lisp, but
> after a while, I always give up. What's the point? Here's something
> that already works, and my translation wouldn't necessarily improve on
> that. I'd have to do lots of tests anyway, for which I have no test
> and verification tools.
Yes, I have the same opinion here.
> However, having said all that, I am certainly not opposed to new
> functions in Lisp, for the reasons you give. I'd actually encourage
> that. I think there are lots of functions for which we have no
> numerical version.
>
> I'm just not motivated to replace f2cl'ed Fortran code with new Lisp
> code. But this is just my opinion.
I don't feel any motivation to replace the f2cl stuff either.
FWIW
Robert