[petsc-dev] Multigrid is confusing

[Matthew Knepley]

On Thu, May 24, 2012 at 10:25 PM, Jed Brown <jedbrown at mcs.anl.gov> wrote:

> On Thu, May 24, 2012 at 9:17 PM, Barry Smith <bsmith at mcs.anl.gov> wrote:
>
>>   Sarcasm on --
>>   Yes, of course. It is essentially done, write it up and I want it on my
>> desk by 8 AM Friday.
>>  -- Sarcasm off
>>
>>   So what if we know the primatives. How does it give us the "language"
>> to express these kernels and the tools to do the processing?
>>
>
> I hate C++ templates as much as the next guy, but I think they can do this
> without insanity. I think we could also do it with a handful of macro hacks
> and C inline functions.
>
> Sure, we might be able to make a cool DSL for expressing this stuff, but
> I'm afraid we'd end up spending more time and debugging confusion making it
> play with everything else than we'd gain by having the DSL in the first
> place.
>
> I could be totally wrong.
>

I think its wrong, but not for the obvious reason. You can do very elegant
things with macros, but
they always end up being thrown away when you have to maintain them and
have others understand
them.

   Matt

-- 
What most experimenters take for granted before they begin their
experiments is infinitely more interesting than any results to which their
experiments lead.
-- Norbert Wiener
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