On 6/10/10 12:25 PM, Florent Hivert wrote:
Hi There,I'd like to discuss a design question. Some time ago Adrien Boussicault and myself started to write some experimental code for copy-on-write in Sage/Python. The idea is now more or less dropped because performance gain was not so good and the syntax was not very usable.
Rob and I were just talking yesterday how it's so inconvenient that identity_matrix() now returns an immutable matrix, so constructing something from it involves making a copy, which is not the most obvious thing to a new person, or the most elegant thing to someone that has been using matrices for a while now. It would be fantastic if immutable matrices had copy-on-write semantics, not necessarily for performance, but just for usability after some of the recent design decisions (which I guess were made for performance reasons).
I like the ideas you've described in the rest of the message, so +1 on the prototype ideas too!
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