Re: [Axiom-developer] Re: debugging

[Waldek Hebisch]

> Greetings!  
> 
> OK the issue is that you are setting the compiler::fixed-args property
> -- a legacy function signature facility which may have even been
> implemented to support axiom for all that I know.  The short fix is to
> stop setting this property and let GCL figure out the signature on its
> own.
>

Thanks, I have disabled setting fixed-args property.  This allowed
to go trough algebra at safety 1.  To dump databases I needed to
upgrade gcl to current cvs.  I see rather bad test results.  It is
possible that some problems are due to upgraging gcl during the
build, so I started a fresh one.
 
> In more detail, this flag was intended to allow the user to assert a
> signature of the form '((t t t) t).  A better way follows acl2,
> (declaim (ftype (function (t t t) t) foo)), which is supported by the
> ansi standard and is compatible with the new automatic function
> signature discovery mechanism.  But either signature would be wrong
> here as the functions in question return double float.  These cannot
> be supported via the fastlink mechanism as the return type does not
> portably fit in one machine word.  GCL compiles such (at safety <=2)
> as a local C function returning double, and a global wrapper boxing
> the double into a lisp object.  GCL is incorrectly relying on
> 'fixed-args to determine that a wrapper is not necessary.
> 
> If 'fixed-args is to be kept, I need to make it compatible with the
> automatic function signature discovery, but the simplest for me would
> be to ignore the property, depending on axiom's needs.  It seems
> redundant with declaim anyway.  Thoughts welcome.
>

I would like the 'fixed-args property to go away.  However, we
need to some work to make Axiom faster and to know which
techniques are effective.


-- 
                              Waldek Hebisch
address@hidden