At 09:44 AM 10/23/00 -0700, Larry Wall wrote:
>David L. Nicol writes:
>: Steve Fink wrote (and I edited slightly):
>:
>: > <groan> I can't figure out why so many people misinterpret my RFC12
>: > as requiring a solution to the halting problem.
>:
>: a large class of incompletely expressed
>: suggestions appear to get grouped into
>:
>: "This requires solving the halting problem!"
>:
>: without providing further explanation.
>
>Well, in my case, I wasn't actually meaning it strictly. Sorry for the
>imprecision--it's hard to squeeze everything into a talk. To me the
>saying is just shorthand for "potentially sufficiently computationally
>expensive that I don't want to worry about it for the default case".
>In other words, I was lumping polynomial in with exponential, and RFC12
>feels polynomial to me. And it's not that I'm against the availability
>of polynomial algorithms in the parser, or the use of polynomial
>algorithms in general--I just think the default compile-and-run parser
>should avoid them.
I'm really hoping to make allowances for a variety of optional
optimizations. We can save the nastier things (and with perl's active data,
a lot of stuff could reasonably be classed as difficult--good
optimization's going to need fairly complex flow analysis, I think) for
explicit requests, possibly with different default optimization levels for
parse-and-go perl and compile-to-bytecode perl.
Dan
--------------------------------------"it's like this"-------------------
Dan Sugalski even samurai
[EMAIL PROTECTED] have teddy bears and even
teddy bears get drunk
