Re: [Caml-list] Physical counterpart to Pervasives.compare?

[Pascal Cuoq <Pascal.Cuoq@cea.fr>]

[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 1743 bytes --]

Pascal Cuoq a écrit :
>> Elnatan Reisner wrote:
>>> Is there something that can complete this analogy:
>>> (=) is to (==) as Pervasives.compare is to ___?
>>>
> The simple solution is to number at creation the objects that you  
> want to
> physically compare, using an additional field.

Since people are still participating in this topic,
I have a remark. It is more a "what not to do" kind of
remark, but after replying last time, I remembered
that the current algorithm used by OCaml's GC
for compaction does not change the order of blocks
in memory (byterun/compact.c). Therefore, with the
current version, if you make sure in some way
that the values that you want to compare
are allocated directly in the major heap
(there are a couple of ways to do that),
you can theoretically compare their addresses
as unsigned longs: their order will not change
during execution.
But you should still do the comparison
with a unique C function written for this purpose.
If you tried to use a "convert address to int" function,
you would have a race condition between the conversion
of each address and garbage collection.

This is all in very poor taste, even more so than
the usual discussions about == on this list.
Do I get some kind of prize for breaking the record?

Pascal
__
PS: I wrote a "convert address to int" function for
another purpose once. In order to increase my chances
for the prize, I will provide it here. Someone might be
interested in it. Perhaps someone who maintains a small
library for computing the size of an ML value...

external address_of_value: 'a -> int = "address_of_value"

value address_of_value(value v)
{
   return (Val_long(((unsigned long)v)/sizeof(long)));
}


[-- Attachment #2: Type: text/html, Size: 3558 bytes --]