Ed's Big Plans

Brief: Just needed a simple EOL (end of line) converter — Chris is working on a windows system while Stefan and I work in Mac OS — here’s the source.

The HPC serial cluster “Whale” on SharcNet has installed Python 2.3 for all of its nodes; in fact, I can almost guarantee that Python 2.3 is standard across SharcNet.

This means that there is no subprocessor module and no top-level exit() function (use sys.exit() instead). A few iterator constructs and other top-level functions are changed, notably the semantics of zip(), range() and xrange()– interestingly, on review– I *should* have used enumerate() in these incompatible cases anyway. But then again, this now-legacy code was written long before I even knew about that function.

This is actually NOT quite as bad as it sounds, since there aren’t too too many features that can’t be backported to work with Python 2.3 (SharcNet) and Python 2.6 simultaneously (Tin & Pewter). In future, when I switch to Python 3.0, I’ll have to take even more care since syntax changes and some major revisions have been adopted (for one, “print” the language construct is now print() a normal top-level function)… In reality, I’m likely to have both installed and will treat them as seperate languages (a sane way to manage legacy code, I’m told).

Today, I’m working on backporting the NGN to be 100% compatible with SharcNet– it takes far too long to compile, zip, upload, decompress, compile, run– the cycle can be expidited by having just a single compile procedure. So far, the problem can be traced to some issues with iterators implemented early on… I can likely take this opportunity to make some of the code more efficient as well.

UPDATE: The convergence was not as straightforward as I had hoped– I’ll still rely on two compile steps. As it turns out, there’s a String.partition() step which is impossible to ignore. It’s possible to do a String.split(), and then rejoin each subsequent segment together, but the amount of testing needed… I’ll need to return to updating the NGN code later. For now, I’m able to at least cleanly break apart the compilation into a “source generation” step, then a “compilation” step.