note about the design of mx-op-defs.h

[Jaroslav Hajek]

hi,

during my recent job optimizing the reduction functions, I couldn't
help noticing that any change within mx-inlines.cc triggered a
horrible compilation cascade in which more than half of liboctave and
liboctinterp was recompiled. Tracking the reason I found that
mx-inlines.cc is #included in mx-op-defs.h and this is in turn
included in many header files to provide declarations for various
operations.
For future development, it would be much better to separate the
declarative and executive parts of mx-op-defs.h and MArray-defs.h (and
more?). I bet this would also speed-up the compilation significantly.
Almost certainly not worth doing for 3.2, but rather a suggestion for
future 3.4/4.0 project.
Right now Octave compiles IMHO quite slowly. Although slow compilation
is kind of typical for C++, I still think that we could improve this
somewhat by sorting out issues like the above.

cheers

-- 
RNDr. Jaroslav Hajek
computing expert
Aeronautical Research and Test Institute (VZLU)
Prague, Czech Republic
url: www.highegg.matfyz.cz