🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1992Oct8.124228.10449@kth.se> kff@dentex.tds.kth.se (Karl-Filip Faxen) writes:
>In article <TMB.92Oct7181835@arolla.idiap.ch>, tmb@arolla.idiap.ch (Thomas M. Breuel) writes:
>
>|> (in fact, not having this
>|> control over evaluation and resources is precisely why I don't like
>|> lazy evaluation).
>
>And it is precisely why I like it. I believe that the "creative" part
>of an algorithm is specifying the data dependencies. Then a good
>compiler should be able to come up with an evaluation order that is at
>least as efficient in terms of resource (eg memory) consumption,
>locality and (when the machine can take advantage of it) parallelism,
>as any I could come up with myself with a reasonable amount of work.

My somewhat uninformed but not completely naive opinion is that this is
expecting way too much from the compiler, and that in fact some level of
control of resources is almost as much a part of the algorithmic process as
specifying data dependencies.  In general there is way too much parallelism
and you have to careful of the order of operations to avoid running out of
memory.  

Note that I am somewhat biased in this matter.  The company I work for has
managed to do quite well by taking almost exactly the opposite point of
view from that expressed above.  I think there is a happy medium somewhere
between the two extremes.

Mark Bromley
Thinking Machines Corp.