"DS" == Dan Sugalski <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
Speaking personally, being able to automatically convert a Parrot array
to an array of ints or floats would be very useful, but that's because I
do fairly hard-core number crunching in my day job. What are the
arguments againtst putting something like this in the NCI interface?
Mainly it's two more things for the interface, which grows ever larger. Past that, well... there's no real argument against other than it means more funky assembly code for the JIT building call frames.
but it is (just about) one time only work and will save tons of repeated
tricky work down the line for those who will embed c libs in parrot. the
richer this api is, the less problems for the nci users and that is
important IMO. but as i said in my other reply, handling hashes is a big
issue and that can't deal will all possible cases (while you can deal
with most of the cases for arrays).
Yeah, the hash case is less of a clear win--in addition to the complexity issues you mentioned, they are also much less used in pure C code (almost never, really)--since there's no standard hash type in C, people tend to not write C-based interfaces which use them.
JEff
