[Gridflow-dev] ping (fwd)

[Mathieu Bouchard]

On Thu, 9 Sep 2004, Mathieu Bouchard wrote:
> On Wed, Sep 08, 2004 at 10:09:08PM -0400, Mathieu Bouchard wrote:
> > Then I think you can make that parallel between any two sufficiently
> > powerful languages, unless I'm mistaken as to the nature of Forth.
> maybe it's about coroutines, pipes and
> ls|grep|awk|sed|whatever > /dev/null

Ok, I didn't know Forth supported coroutines. BTW I once thought about
making each GridFlow object activation its own thread, just a kind of soft
thread such as Ruby's that would allow objects to work more like UNIX. I
didn't do it, because it introduces more overhead and complications than
simplifications...

Do you actually use Forth's coroutines to stream data from object to
object?

> i've been doing a lot of advocating lately, and the simplest
> explanation for me still is: it just works out.

It's not an explanation, it's just praise. An explanation actually
explains something.

> > that. Else the only way to achieve it seems to be to reserve inlets and
> > outlets specially for messages going the other way. The best example of it
> > in GridFlow is [#remap_image].
> it seems to me you're describing systolic arrays.

I don't know what your systolic array concept is, and I hope the word
"array" means "network" more than "list of data", because that type of
flow doesn't depend on grids.

> forgive my sloppy terminology. open source world i meant. the fairly
> recent culture of wide availability of high quality source code.

> most of the diversity you don't see. it's all those people doing stuff
> they never release.

right.

> i don't think it's very fast either. pf is not a really fast forth, but 
> it's still compiled to byte code when it loads. so no parsing or symbol 
> lookup overhead during execution. all pointers.

Tcl8 is compiled to bytecode and although everything still looks like a
text string on the surface, under the hood there's an atom-like structure
that can directly represent ints, floats, and lists. Back in 1997, this
made most Tcl7 programs become approximately 10 times faster overnight,
while keeping 99% backward compatibility.

________________________________________________________________
Mathieu Bouchard                       http://artengine.ca/matju