Scientific computing with D

[Bill Baxter]

On Sat, Jan 31, 2009 at 8:39 PM, Daniel Keep
<daniel.keep.lists at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> Walter Bright wrote:
>> Bill Baxter wrote:
>>> Having to recompile and rerun after every one of those changes just
>>> isn't quite as direct.
>>
>> If it can be done in under half a second, isn't that direct enough? Of
>> course, I'm talking about a shell that does it for you.
>
> $ int a = 42;
> $ writefln("a = %s", a);
> $ double a = 3.0; // rounded to 1 sf
>
> How would you write a prompt that does that with D?  Either you store
> each successive line in a source file and choke on the third one, or you
> compile each line separately and choke on the second.
>
> Or you could examine each line to look for things like redefining of
> symbols... but at that point you're half way to writing an interpreter
> anyway.
>

[/me discards half-written message saying the same thing half as well
with twice as many words]

*If* you could invoke the compiler as a library and have it return you
a pointer to a freshly compiled function in memory somewhere, then you
might have a shot and something that's a usable interactive prompt.
Hmm compiler as a dll... sounds familiar.  :-)

--bb