SASADA Koichi wrote:
> Hi,
> 
> M. Edward (Ed) Borasky wrote:
>> also at RubyConf -- the guy that wants "narray" semantics as a primitive
>> data type in Ruby 1.9.1 :)
> 
> I want to ask you after that, but there were no opportunities.  Your
> opinion is to integrate NArray and Ruby in syntax level, right?  I think
> that is language design and I can't decide it.
> 

I don't think the syntax is as big an issue as the semantics. As long as
the syntax is "Ruby-like", what I'm asking for is that there be an
efficient floating point and efficient fixnum array data type. That
essentially means that a floating point or fixnum array object occupies
a contiguous group of "words" in memory and can be indexed in the same
manner as in C or Fortran.

At the virtual machine level, you'd probably want to add vector
pseudo-instructions that execute the most common inner loops from
scientific computing. There aren't that many -- implement the level 1
BLAS and the bit-reversed indexing of a one-dimensional complex array
required by an FFT and you're done. Everything else is an "outer loop"
and can be done at the Ruby level without losing a heck of a lot.

At some point in the not too distant future I'm going to be looking at
the implementation of NArray itself, so stay tuned.

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