At 11:59 AM 3/28/2001 -0500, John Porter wrote:
>Dan Sugalski wrote:
> >...
> > subs inside the sort sub are called" then life becomes much easier.
>
>Easier for perl. Don't we want to make life easier for the programmer?
>I mean, in general, it would be nice if there were a way to have
>perl memoize for us, rather than have to arrange it ourself.
>It could benefit a lot of situations besides sorting.
I'm not talking about making it easier on perl so much as making it faster.
Basically to give us the wiggle room to recognize some simple constructs like
foo($a) <=> bar($b)
or
foo($a) cmp bar($b)
and optimize them to a table build and sort. This would work for plain perl
data structures as well, as we might potentially be doing a fair amount of
data conversion through the variable vtable interface. (Not to mention the
issues of data mangling for proper Unicode sorting support)
Dan
--------------------------------------"it's like this"-------------------
Dan Sugalski even samurai
[EMAIL PROTECTED] have teddy bears and even
teddy bears get drunk
