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[Axiom-developer] lattice


From: daly
Subject: [Axiom-developer] lattice
Date: Thu, 10 Aug 2006 14:47:59 -0500

> I am quite sure that all the hundreds of targets in Lattice.pamphlet 
> follow exactly the same pattern. Shouldn't we have a short program that 
> replaces 40,000 Makefile lines???

Two points: 

Point 1: Lattice is not used. It is there so that we can create the
lattice of the algebra code for documentation purposes. The new sed/awk
based version does not contain that information.

Point 2: Make is a rule-based programming language. Each rule 
specifies a particular situation and then specifies the MINIMUM
amount of work necessary to rebuild the system. The rules are 
written to optimize the most frequent case. The most frequent
case is changing a file and rebuilding the system.

Perl/sed/awk scripts tend to minimize the number of places you need to 
change to modify the way the system is built. Reducing the rules
to perl scripts optimizes this, the least most frequent action and
sacrifices the most frequent case.

Bill and I had this discussion years ago. The algebra Makefile is
no longer 40k lines of rules and uses sed/awk scripts.

Tim




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