Tim Murphy (29 May 2020 01:02) wrote:
> Integer maths is important at the language level - it will enable
> algorithms that weren't possible before e.g. dividing a list into
> equal halves or a for-loop for which we also need a function that
> generates a range).
Indeed. The only case I can think of where I wished I had the ability
to do arithmetic in make-files was when building large .a files out of
many many .o files, enough to hit line-length limits. Doing it one .o
at a time hit quadratic behaviour in ar, so doing it in batches, as
large as would fit on the command-line, was our best option; being able
to do arithmetic would have let us automate that cleanly, rather than
kludge it by trial and error.
Eddy.
