Re: Parallelizing (WAS: Death by pointers.)

>4. As noted recently in comp.lang.functional, most modern languages
>emphasize lists (and other general forms) over special cases such as arrays
>and vectors, although those special cases are precisely the forms that are
>most easilly optimized, and are commonly associated with difficult
>problems.


Lists can easily be optimised to be as efficient as arrays in most
cases - there is no constraint to use a head and tail representation
for the list and it is not uncommon for Lisp implementations, say, to
use a block (perhaps a page in size) of elements, where the cdr is
always derived as the address of the next car. You can then vector
optimise on this as happily as you could with Fortran90 arrays.
However Fortran90 is a good example of a language where the array is
the prime data constructor and with a rich syntax of operations on
arrays that are highly amenable to optimisation.


Regards,
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Dave Lloyd Email: Dave@occl-cam.demon.co.uk
Oxford and Cambridge Compilers Ltd Phone: (44) 1223 572074
55 Brampton Rd, Cambridge CB1 3HJ, UK
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