[pypy-dev] Who's developing language interpreters in PyPy

[Terry Reedy]

"Martijn Faassen" <faassen at startifact.com> wrote in message 
news:f0hsqn$d4b$1 at sea.gmane.org...
|Numpy appears to be the official merger between Numeric and Numarray.

*is*, insofar as anything is 'official'.

|It sounds a bit odd to use Numeric for the implementation of R that way,
|but it'd make sense to be able to do so, right?

'R' is both a (statistics/data analisis) language and an interpreter 
system.  (I have not used it but read some some time ago.)  The latter, I 
presume, is implemented in some combination of C and Fortran, as are NumPy 
and SciPy.  I would not be surprised if the R system used some of the same 
libraries (BLAS, LinPack, FFTPack, etc).  So, if the array concepts are 
compatible, it make perfect sense to me to base an alternate implemention 
of R the language on NumPy and the R functions that are already in SciPy.

The motivation would either be a) proof of concept of PyPy as a general 
platform for implementing dynamic languages or b) an implementation with 
value-added for users (free (if R is not yet), open-source (ditto), access 
to other Python facilities).

| Naturally PyPy wouldn't be able to use its magical optimization abilities 
on those bits

Many to most of 'those bits' have been heavily optimized already, which is 
why to use them.

Terry Jan Reedy