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1 point by sacado 6125 days ago | link | parent

Hmm... I think I'll have to read that more deeply later on... There are obviously interesting ideas in it, but hard to implement... Not sure I understood everything yet...

Currently, I'm working on a naïve approach : it supposes native numerical functions (only numerics as for now) are not redefined, or, at least, that they are redefined in a conservative way (that is, as you mention it, e.g. + was redefined to be able to add apple, a user type, but still works the regular way with numbers), and it knows that, if a numerical operation is called only with numbers :

- it can use its inlined version,

- the result will be a number too, so nested numerical operations can be taken into account too.

For example, when we call (fib 30), the compiler knows the n arg and literal numbers are numbers, so (- n 1) and (- n 2) and (< n 2) are numbers too and this gets translated into (n- n 1), (n- n2) and (n< n 2). However, it cannot know (yet) (fib (n- n 1)) is a number, so the final sum cannot rely on the inlined + :

  (gen-ad-hoc (listtab '((n int))) '(fn (n)
    (if (< n 2)
      n
      (+ (fib (- n 1) (fib (- n 2)))))))

  -> (fn (n) (if (n< n 2) n (+ ((fib (n- n 1) (fib (n- n 2)))))))
The gen-ad-hoc function generates the ad hoc code, based on the fact that n is an int. I still have a few bugs (too many parens somewhere), but that's a good start :)