division of objects into classes and structures is bad

[Andrei Alexandrescu]

Bill Baxter wrote:
> On Wed, Dec 31, 2008 at 4:32 AM, Andrei Alexandrescu
> <SeeWebsiteForEmail at erdani.org> wrote:
>> Don wrote:
>>> Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:
>>>> Don wrote:
>>>>> Christopher Wright wrote:
>>>>>> Don wrote:
>>>>>>> The creation of temporaries during expressions is something I'm
>>>>>>> currently working on solving. The case you mentioned is addressed by a
>>>>>>> proposal I made long ago:
>>>>>> The easiest way is to add an intermediate struct. This takes a fair bit
>>>>>> of manual effort, though, and prevents you from using auto.
>>>>> That particular case is the easiest possible one. The case x = y - x,
>>>>> for example, is much more difficult to recognize.
>>>>>
>>>>>> Essentially, you need a struct MyClassAddition that just records
>>>>>> operands. Then give it an implicit cast to MyClass that does the work. This
>>>>>> is an ugly solution because you need to duplicate the operator overloads on
>>>>>> MyClassXXX as well as MyClass.
>>>>>>
>>>>>> I believe I got this solution from an article by Andrei. It should work
>>>>>> pretty well for classes that define few overloads.
>>>>> I'm talking about a language solution. I want to solve this for the
>>>>> general case.
>>>> Don't forget that the case you are solving is not general enough because
>>>>  you are focusing on eliminating temporaries, which is only part of the
>>>> story. I suggest you make place in your thoughts for loop fusion.
>>> Yes. That's the classic problem for matrices, but I'm still trying to work
>>> out if it is really a general problem. I was hoping to see some new use
>>> cases, but none so far.
>> I think the matrices case is important enough to make it its own class of
>> problems. For example, bitmap processing is another instance of matrix
>> usefulness, just one that doesn't usually jump to mind when thinking of
>> matrices.
> 
> Graph algorithms can often be thought of as matrices too.
> I recall some shortest path algorithms where you write edge weight
> between node i & j in the i,j entry.  Then you do a multiply on the
> matrices, but instead of using the regular vector inner product for
> each <row, column>, you use max().  I forget which algo it is.  I'm
> thinking Floyd-Warshall.  Also there was some algorithm I recall that
> can be done with a boolean matrix.  Probably some kind of connected
> components algo?
> 
> --bb

Any graph algorithm that uses e.g. the adjacency matrix... well, uses a 
matrix :o).

Andrei