back in toronto. cleaned apartment, moved everything around, paid loads of bills, back in my normal life with frances. everything feels mostly right again.

current fascination is with the perverse beauty of "generative programming"; in particular, with the horrors of expression templates and their use in compile time optimization of scientific computation. This is sick, dark magic business and I love it.

thus far, authors have explored this technique in making unrolled vector libraries and simulating functional programming. I'm interested in seeing if the same technique can be effectively used to do an arbitrary precision rationals package in C++ without any performance hit. I think it can, but I'm still surveying the literature. it's even crossed my mind that such a library could select appropriate cases in which to use long word & vector integer coprocessors, so common on today's CPUs :)

this is especially interesting because, now that I'm fiddling with quantum chemistry programs, I'm really coming to loathe floating point math.

the other possibly useful thing which could be done at a static metaprogramming level is to reorder expressions to minimize truncation and roundoff error if you happen to be using FP. so much interesting stuff to explore. sigh

going out to a party now...