User talk:WillNess

Hi WillNess, If reporting runtimes please restrict it to comparative times between two implementations using the same language and try and use loose comparative terms such as 'around twice' rather than actual times as anything other than that is very difficult to interpret w.r.t. run conditions, OS, ... And RC doesn't set out to be a site for comparative run-time evaluations.
Thanks, --Paddy3118 11:37, 5 September 2011 (UTC)

Hi, you made an edit to Hamming numbers with the comment "according to docs for tee() storage is NOT shared among its iterators". I would like to know what you mean. What does it mean that storage is not shared. --208.80.119.67 00:49, 9 September 2011 (UTC)

Documentation says it is "equivalent to":

<lang Python>def tee(iterable, n=2):

   it = iter(iterable)
   deques = [collections.deque() for i in range(n)]
   def gen(mydeque):
       while True:
           if not mydeque:             # when the local deque is empty
               newval = next(it)       # fetch a new value and
               for d in deques:        # load it to all the deques
                   d.append(newval)
           yield mydeque.popleft()
   return tuple(gen(d) for d in deques)

</lang>

I read it to show that each generator produced by tee() holds on to its own dequeue (list with pop() and append()). When a new item is taken from the original iterable, it is appended separately into each one of the dequeues. Were they all to share one dequeue amongst themselves, that would be a shared storage. popleft() wouldn't be always called, but only when the leftmost of internal iterators pointing into internal list would get advanced. WillNess 10:53, 9 September 2011 (UTC)

Good morning, Can you please undo the double-space style changes that you made on the Sieve thread-based solution? I find that kind of spacing much harder to read. Also, my intention in writing that code was to demonstrate Racket's ability to express solutions in different paradigms as well as show how such different solutions are really doing the same thing. For this reason I would like to keep unnecessary optimizations at a very minimal level. It's therefore questionable that the changes that you made (stepping by 2x, explicit 3 in the beginning) are worth it. Whatever speedup you get as a result of changing the argument order is definitely not worth it for this goal. So please avoid such optimizations -- not turning this website into a festival of obscure optimizations like the language shootout thing is one of its most appealing properties. Thanks, --Elibarzilay (talk) 03:58, 6 November 2015 (UTC)

Hi, Eli. About the spacing. For me, it is much more readable that way, and since I'm much less proficient than you are (no emotional charge here, just plain fact) at reading and writing Scheme/Racket, I can only assume that it will also be much easier for a casual reader, unfamiliar with the language -- which I assume is the target audience of this site. As for the evens "optimization", I'll try to revert it. -- WillNess (talk) 13:00, 6 November 2015 (UTC)

I remember now how that happened. You had (ints-from 3 2) there, and I just went along with your 2, instead of correcting it to 1. WillNess (talk) 13:39, 6 November 2015 (UTC)

I don't think that that code is mine, at least not directly (the whole sieve thing went out of control with all kinds of arguments around it, which lead to a pile of stuff that goes against simple examples, and I got tired of fighting it at some point). Still, I'd like to see it stays at roughly the same level with no further obscuring optimizations... As for the spacing, being a newbie or not is really not a good factor (if only because many real newbies writing single parens on a line in an attempt to mimic C), instead, it should be as standard looking as possible, and double spaces is something that is not. --Elibarzilay (talk) 19:38, 9 November 2015 (UTC)

here's your edit with the (ints-from 3 2) throughout, and some additional spacing in the else clauses which I interpreted as arbitrary space to achieve code alignment for visual effect. I'll remove the double spacing an retain that additional space in the else clauses, shortly. -- WillNess (talk) 20:54, 9 November 2015 (UTC)

The edits being done by me don't say much, since code was shuffled a lot, and it's likely that I copied and/or translated things while doing that. But whether I copied it or I did it, the general thing is that optimizations that obscure the code should be avoided here... Thanks for the edits! --Elibarzilay (talk) 22:45, 10 November 2015 (UTC)

I'm not seeking to assign any blame obviously, I just didn't know (then) how to interpret your intent and took it to the other side, I guess. But what you're saying makes perfect sense. Thanks, -- WillNess (talk) 19:37, 11 November 2015 (UTC)

No problems -- I just wanted to clarify how things got to where they are, and even though I did many edits the result is not something I'm too happy with... The original --simple-- code that I had in a way that nicely demonstrates the similarities between laziness, threads, and generators is now stashed in the obscurely named "Sequence_of_primes_by_Trial_Division#Racket" -- the sieve code is the results of many butcherings of that code, once there were complaints that the simple version is not really an "Eratosthenes Sieve" (I'm still not convinced, the rules sound like something that was retrofitted to the greek guy). --Elibarzilay (talk) 01:02, 18 November 2015 (UTC)