Re: Vectorizing Dylan?

[Scott_Fahlman@SEF-PMAX.SLISP.CS.CMU.EDU]

    Since you are working on a language for the 1990ies, where I expect
    to see more vector processors than today, I wonder whether it would 
    not be appropriate to include vectorizing constructs into Dylan from
    the beginning.

This sounds like a good job for a library.  The nice thing about the way
Dylan is being organized is that there's no sharp division between what's
"in" the language and what is available as a well-known and widely used
library.  The trick will be to get this package out early and in solid
shape.

The only tricky thing will be to make sure that the rules for sealing and
inlining are such that a compiler can take advantage of any primitive
high-speed vector operations that a machine might support.  But this same
requirement comes up all over the place (for example, in a machine whose
ALU supports SIN or MULTIPLY/ACCUMULATE or operations on primitive ASCII
strings), and I'm sure it's being worked on by the Dylan designers.

-- Scott