Re: Unpredictable programming

From: Bruno Desthuilliers <onurb_at_xiludom.gro>
Date: Thu, 29 Jun 2006 18:29:03 +0200
Message-ID: <44a3ffcf$0$21283$626a54ce@news.free.fr>

Marshall wrote:
> Bruno Desthuilliers wrote:
>

>>Bob Badour wrote:
>>(snip)
>>
>>
>>>which naturally separates the concern for
>>>correctness from the concern for efficiency. Those of us who understand
>>>the relational model and SQL, understand that one can address the
>>>concern for efficiency separately, for example by creating indexes, by
>>>clustering data, and by automating the translation from the declarative
>>>language to the physical hardware.
>>
>>May work for DBMS, but would it be that easy for a more general-purpose
>>language ? (real question, not trying to make a point)

>
>
> I believe it would be possible, although I have no opinion on "easy."
> I note that nothing about progamming languages is easy. Nonetheless,
> in general it makes sense to burden those implementing the lower
> levels vs. those implementing the upper levels. Consider how,
> if we make one O/S programmer work harder, we are leveraging
> thousands (at least) of programmers who will use his work. The
> same applies to DBMS programmers and language implementors.

Indeed, but this is rather general consideration and seems somewhat obvious. DBMS "optimisation" is already a non-trivial job wrt/ both DBMS implementation and administration/fine tuning, and the scope is AFAICT somewhat more limited than a general purpose programming language.

Now I just know enough about this topic to know I lack the required knowledge to do more than ask possibly dumb questions, so please bear with me !-)

>>>The OO computational model is simply not as amenable to higher order
>>>transformations. The executable code more directly reflects the
>>>specification. For instance, optimizers do not combine object classes to
>>>transform a collection of possibly inefficient state machines into a
>>>single more-efficient state machine.
>>
>>But would that really be - at least in theory - impossible ? (idem as above)

>
>
> I didn't notice that he said "impossible"-- he said "not as amenable."

I noticed the words. But natural languages are far more ambigous and fuzzy than programming languages, and English is still not my first language, so I don't know for sure how I should compile the whole thing - hence my demand for clarification.

-- 
bruno desthuilliers
python -c "print '@'.join(['.'.join([w[::-1] for w in p.split('.')]) for
p in 'onurb_at_xiludom.gro'.split('@')])"

Received on Thu Jun 29 2006 - 11:29:03 CDT