Saturday, August 20, 2005

Countdown

Alright! After almost 8 months of more than full-time hacking the end is in sight. Everything is looking great. I'm hoping to finish the final three features of my soc-todo-list today, except for integrating a GC, which I hope to do tomorrow. The three features are: support for nested tuple assignments, e.g. a,(b,c) = expr (this may also occur inside for loops/list comprehensions), bootstrapping some useful builtins (enumerate, zip, min, max) and supporting untyped constructors that do not flow to any instance variable assignments, e.g. in return [], we may want this to become a list(str), because for example there is a return ['u'] in the same function.

The last thing I would like to do is compile a simple neural network simulator that I wrote a while ago, as the final test case before a 0.1 release. It will require writing C++ versions of some external calls (e.g. math.e, random.random).

In all it seems there are no hard problems left as far as my aims go. Of course I could easily work another few years on the problem, supporting more and more flexible code, extending many features (e.g. internally typed ternary tuples..), work on extreme scalability (by profiling/maintaining object contours) etc. etc. For now I only intend to perform several long-overdue cleanups over the following months, as well as (hopefully) adding programs written by other people to the unit test set and fixing any problems they may have (again, as far as my aims go.)

Hmm, I just realized I practically haven't had a single day off over the last 8 months.. Maybe it's time for that vacation now..

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