Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!uflorida!gatech!rutgers!caip.rutgers.edu!peskin
From: peskin@caip.rutgers.edu (R. L. Peskin)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.smalltalk
Subject: Re: Re: Smalltalk for Scientific Applications
Message-ID: 
Date: 16 Aug 89 15:50:19 GMT
Organization: Rutgers Univ., New Brunswick, N.J.
Lines: 34


>This is an excellent question. The major problem with implementation of 
>user primitives in Smalltalk-80 from PPS is the inability to walk and 
>examine the object space from the primitive. This makes it virtually 
>impossibe to efficiently pass complex data to primitives, thus severely 
>limiting the potential of the userPrims.The best hope is to pass arrays of 
>numbers to the primitive, which is at least fairly quick. Passing compound 
>objects (to e examined by the code of the primitive) is not supported.

For what it is worth, Tektronix last (& final, I think) Smalltalk release does 
support userPrims (wriiten in C) that share object memory.
>
>Were this remedied, the potential would be vast indeed.  Creating 
>primitives to handle expensive calculations would quickly move 
>Smalltalk-80 into the big leagues of scientific computing, particularly in 
>areas like visualization systems.

We also feel that some sort of "rapid" generator of primitives (starting with 
Smalltalk code) is going to be essential. It would allow users to develop 
prototype models and then move them to efficient instantiations.
>
--dick


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 Richard L. Peskin     CAIP Parallel Computing Lab                      
 CAIP Center CN - 1390  Rutgers University       
 Piscataway, N. J. 08855-1390             
         net: peskin@caip.rutgers.edu              
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-- 
goodby