Performance: simplify constructor about intervalarithmetic.jl HOT 9 CLOSED

(Closed accidentally.)

from intervalarithmetic.jl.

I understand the idea, but I'm not so sure about it; I'm simply thinking about the "validated" part of all that.

What about implementing an UnsafeInterval type (or whatever name you want) which does what you want (and is not exported), and the relevant methods to convert it to an Interval, which involves checking the correctness of the interval?

from intervalarithmetic.jl.

Given a valid interval, all the functions in the library will return a valid interval.
(If they didn't, then the current test suite would fail.)

So the problem is only constructing valid intervals to start with, which is what the interval function will check for.

Using an UnsafeInterval type will simply require rewriting every function in the library to use it ;)

from intervalarithmetic.jl.

Although it's possible that it would be useful to make a SafeInterval type that does all the checking (as currently stands), make both of them subtypes of an abstract supertype, and rewrite everything to use the abstract supertype.

abstract Interval

immutable UnsafeInterval <: Interval
immutable SafeInterval <: Interval

and run the test suite with both types sometimes.

from intervalarithmetic.jl.

Whatever (SafeInterval or UnsafeInterval) I think this is more convenient than the function interval, since we would be dispatching on them.

The question is how to enforce the user to use the SafeInterval? I think we should do it by only exporting the SafeInterval version (currently Interval) and constructing a fast conversion from UnsafeInterval to SafeInterval. Yet, I'm not sure how to avoid the checks in SafeInterval...

from intervalarithmetic.jl.

I have implemented a simpler solution in the simplify_constructor branch: there is a global variable validity_check defined at the start of intervals.jl. If it is true, then the validity check is compiled into the constructor; if not, then the validity check is omitted.

Currently you have to manually go and change it in that file, and then do using IntervalArithmetic, and validity checks will be enabled.

If validity checks are disabled, then the interval function validates the input and creates the interval.

from intervalarithmetic.jl.

Not sure what else there is to do here.

from intervalarithmetic.jl.

Same as for #36...

from intervalarithmetic.jl.

This has been done: the Interval constructor does no checks; checks are done by using interval.

from intervalarithmetic.jl.