Doubles on Slate

[Lee Salzman]

How about a multi-stage rocket? :)

Ken Causey wrote:

>Lee quickly added the basics of support to ExtLib to at least pass
>double arguments.  See the C support added at
>
>http://slate.tunes.org/cgi-bin/darcs.cgi/main/src/mobius/vm/platform/extprim.c?c=annotate
>
>As he has pointed out adding support to return doubles is considerably
>more involved.  He is of the opinion and I agree that it is in general a
>waste of effort to pursue this at this time.
>
>We all have to keep in mind that all in all Slate is still quite young
>and is growing like a butterfly in stages.  Once upon a time Slate was
>implemented on top of Common Lisp.  And then like the caterpillar that
>it was it was transformed into the butterfly we have now of the pidgin-C
>implementation.  Well, this is not the end of the story, it has longed
>been planned that another complete metamorphosis would occur and a lot
>of work must go into that.  The butterfly analogy breaks down here. ;)
>
>Doing a look of fiddly work to interface with C seems valuable now.  But
>in the next stage it will have much less value and a lot of time spent
>on it now will be more or less wasted.
>
>So the moral of my story is that if you (the plural 'you' meaning us all
>as a community) see something that is needed and you feel that it is
>worth your time to implement it, then go write ahead.  But understand
>that it will probably have a limited lifetime.  And Lee and Brian need
>to be able to spend their time thinking and building for the next stage
>and can't afford to spend their time in this way.
>
>And let me make it clear that I myself have spent time begging for
>support like this in the past.  But I now resolve to try my best to
>either keep quiet or dig in and investigate myself and resist the urge
>to ask.
>
>Ken
>
>On Thu, 2005-05-12 at 13:13 -0300, Pupeno wrote:
>  
>
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>>Je Ĵaŭdo Majo 12 2005 12:31, Pupeno skribis:
>>    
>>
>>>Do you think that there's some way to get ExtLib to handle Doubles without
>>>implementing them on Slate ?
>>>      
>>>
>>Ken thought this wasn't clear enough, so, I'm adding my clarifications from 
>>IRC:
>>is it possible to add support for calling a function that expects a Double 
>>(even if only the precistion of Float is available) ? Like the C compiler can 
>>automatically cast a Float into a Double when needed.
>>
>>- -- 
>>Pupeno: pupeno at pupeno.com - http://pupeno.com
>>Reading Science Fiction ? http://sfreaders.com.ar
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