Rich Morin writes: : At 5:26 PM -0700 4/13/02, Larry Wall wrote: : >Well, Perl 5 doesn't really support compact arrays of known size, and : >those are the only kind that are easy to think about when it comes to : >vectorization. : : Actually, I can think of other possibilities. For instance, aren't : some string operations (e.g., comparing two strings) vectorizable? But : your overall point seems valid.
Yep, that's why I said "easy", not "possible". : Anyway, I'm hoping that quite a lot of this stuff shows up in Perl 6; : my take is that the things that Perl is slow at are the things that I : specify myself (e.g., complicated control structures and code); when : it can simply go off and do something (e.g., I/O), it runs as fast as : the C code that implements the thing it's doing. Yes, to the extent that we can do that without blowing up perl to a 582 terabyte executable, that'll continue to be a good strategy. On the other hand, with the extra optional type information and a JIT, the more your Perl code resembles C, the faster it should run, we hope. Larry
