On Apr 23, 12:08 pm, "Bill Page" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote: ... > Both you and Gaby have discussed the possibility of defining an > abstract machine (aka. run-time system) to replace the role that Lisp > plays for Axiom. We also know that Aldor has already defined such a > machine called FOAM. FOAM can be implemented either in Lisp (for > interface with Axiom) or by a run-time system written entirely in C > for stand alone use. In fact this strategy is quite common and we here > a lot for example about the Java Virtual Machine. > > Now it turns out that Python also has this notion of an abstract > virtual machine that is the target for the Python interpreter. There > are already some languages other than Python that can produce low > level code for the Python virtual machine. I believe that the current > Python virtual machine would very likely be adequate to support the > run time requirements of Axiom/Aldor. So my question is: Is there be > any possibility and interest in producing either an Axiom/Spad or > Aldor compiler that targets this same virtual machine?
I found a little information about FOAM on the web, and it looks like it's probably much faster than the Python VM for any sort of low-level code. For instance, FOAM has an instruction for doing floating-point addition which is presumably very fast; the Python VM has a single addition instruction that checks that the operands are numbers of the same type, then calls the addition method on the left object with the right object as an argument; then the method creates a new object with the result. A Python floating-point addition on my laptop takes around 40ns. Carl --~--~---------~--~----~------------~-------~--~----~ To post to this group, send email to sage-devel@googlegroups.com To unsubscribe from this group, send email to [EMAIL PROTECTED] For more options, visit this group at http://groups.google.com/group/sage-devel URLs: http://www.sagemath.org -~----------~----~----~----~------~----~------~--~---
