Proposal: Multidimensional opSlice solution

[Fawzi Mohamed]

On 9-mar-10, at 13:21, Andrei Alexandrescu wrote:

> Norbert Nemec wrote:
>> Multidimensional arrays are the essence of the interfaces of most  
>> numerical libraries. Having several incompatible standards is a  
>> major roadblock for acceptance in the numerical community.
>
> I'm not so sure about that. I was very enthusiastic about defining  
> an infrastructure of arbitary-dimensional arrays, and did a little  
> research about it. It turns out the applicability of N-dimensional  
> arrays falls off a cliff when N > 3. In turn, this is because high- 
> dimensional space are weird - an N-dimensional space is not just  
> like a 3-dimensional one, only with more dimensions; it's a  
> downright weird beast.

yes and for dense storage, and may operations, the cost is exponential  
in N, so that one normally doesn't really want to go beyond 3. Still I  
did need up to 3, and well if you go with dense storage, up to 3 or up  
to N is more or less the same amount f code if you use templates...

But for non dense storage it gets messy really quick because design  
choices really influence the api that one can use efficiently.

Fawzi