Re: TRM - Morbidity has set in, or not?

From: Marshall <marshall.spight_at_gmail.com>
Date: 17 May 2006 10:19:09 -0700
Message-ID: <1147886349.702914.222780@38g2000cwa.googlegroups.com>

Keith H Duggar wrote:

>

> Yes I believe I do. Unfortunately I do not yet possess the
> knowledge and vocabulary needed to properly formulate the
> questions here. Basically I want to know if and how the RM
> can be leveraged to improve and simplify numerical
> simulations. Typically I implement OO/network models using
> C++. In the recent past slogging through tedious navigational
> code (pointers, iterators, visitors, etc) led me to wonder
> if there was a better way. Hence I wandered over to c.d.t.
> looking for education and inspiration.

Ah, what an excellent topic!

I believe the answer to your question is yes. The most immediate places the RM can help is physical independence and set-at-a-time processing. I think the example of the J programming language

    http://jsoftware.com/

is quite instructive. Although it is more focused on ordered collection rather than relations, it nonetheless has a solid mathematical foundation
and no explicit loops.

Physical independence comes in when one considers how much work many C++ programmers have to do to, for example, lay out their data in a way that will satisfy a graphics coprocessor, or enable them to use SIMD instructions. It would be better if this was abstracted
from the code.

To achieve the big wins, though, we need a programming language that uses the RM at its core, and that has support for physical independence.
I am afraid that at this time this is just a wish.

Marshall Received on Wed May 17 2006 - 12:19:09 CDT