[Matrix-SIG] Fortran-to-python-interface-generator: looking for opinions

[Andrew P. Mullhaupt]

> almost always the case that you would not want to use this
> feature. Obviously we are dealing with two different experience bases. My
> views are based on fifteen years of being in charge of a
Fortran-extendible
> interpreter with hundreds of customers; some of those customers had needs
> similar to yours.

My experience is based on thirty years of programming including eleven years
of _not_ being in charge of Fortran-extendible interpreters, although a
spent some reasonable fraction of that time in contact with, and
contributing to the development of the fastest interpreter known, as well as
being consulted authors of several others. As a result I know several ways
to do most things interpreters do, and have seen the difference between the
"right" ways, the "wrong" ways, and the "usual" ways. As far as I know I am
the only person to have had access to source for both the fastest and
slowest commercial interpreters for array based languages.

In the case of the really fast one, there were many nontrivial cases where
due to the careful attention to implementation of the interpreter
primitives, it was possible to write code which would outperform Fortran or
C code written in a "normally" optimized way. The reason for this was that
it made sense to apply an extremely exigent approach to optimizing
primitives because they were guaranteed to be reused many times as opposed
to the time one could spend optimizing Fortran or C code.

Later,
Andrew Mullhaupt