[Python-Dev] Looking for master thesis ideas involving Python
Brett C.
bac at OCF.Berkeley.EDU
Wed Oct 29 20:05:03 EST 2003
Martin v. Löwis wrote:
> "Brett C." <bac at OCF.Berkeley.EDU> writes:
>
>
>>So, anyone have any ideas? The best one that I can think of is
>>optional type-checking. I am fairly open to ideas, though, in almost
>>any area involving language design.
>
>
> Did you explicitly mean language *design*?
Design/implementation. Basically something involving how a language
either works or is created.
> Because there might be
> areas of research relevant to language implementation, in terms of
> efficiency, portability, etc.
>
> Here are some suggestions:
> - memory management: attempt to replace reference counting by
> "true" garbage collection
Maybe. Kind of happy with the way things work now, though. =)
> - threading: attempt to provide free threading efficiently
Wow, that would be a challenge, to say the least. Might be too much for
just a masters thesis.
> - typing: attempt to provide run-time or static type inference,
> and see whether this could be used to implement some byte codes
> more efficiently (although there is probably overlap with the
> specializing compilers)
I was actually thinking of type-inference since I am planning on
learning (or at least starting to learn) Standard ML next month.
> - floating point: provide IEEE-794 (or some such) in a portable
> yet efficient way
You mean like how we have longs? So code up in C our own way of storing
794 independent of the CPU?
> - persistency: provide a mechanism to save the interpreter state
> to disk, with the possibility to restart it later (similar to
> Smalltalk images)
>
Hmm. Interesting. Could be the start of continuations.
> On language design, I don't have that many suggestions, as I think the
> language itself should evolve slowly if at all:
> - deterministic finalization: provide a way to get objects destroyed
> implicitly at certain points in control flow; a use case would be
> thread-safety/critical regions
I think you get what you mean by this, but I am not totally sure since I
can't come up with a use beyond threads killing themselves properly when
the whole program is shutting down.
> - attributes: provide syntax to put arbitrary annotations to
> functions, classes, and class members, similar to .NET
> attributes. Use that facility to implement static and class methods,
> synchronized methods, final methods, web methods, transactional
> methods, etc (yes, there is a proposal, but nobody knows whether it
> meets all requirements - nobody knows what the requirements are)
Have no clue what this is since I don't know C#. Almost sounds like
Michael's def func() [] proposal at the method level. Or just a lot of
descriptors. =)
Time to do some Googling.
> - interfaces (this may go along with optional static typing)
>
Yeah, but that is Alex's baby.
Thanks for the suggestions, Martin.
-Brett
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