> 
>  From: "Alexandre Ferrieux" <alexandre.ferrieux@[...].com>
>  Subject: Re: [TCLCORE] [SPAM] [6.0] Re: base64 in the core?
>    
>  Now this part is clarified, may I ask about the strength of the motivation ?
>  Are there compelling examples of a need for [string foreach] except
>  for toy Huffmann encoders, toy base64-again, or even toy-parsers ?
>  Greased lightning for toys ?
> 
>  -Alex
>    
Why toy?  I understand your suggestion that all of these examples are 
"toys" to mean that you would consider a Tcl implementation of any of 
this functionality to be a "toy", further implying that a "real" 
implementation would be in C as an extension.

What about those of us that use Tcl as a fully functional language and 
don't intend to drop to C every time we need to do something that 
vaguely resembles byte- or number-crunching in a reasonable period of time?

For example many of the crypto primitives implemented in pure Tcl are 
around two orders of magnitude slower than a C equivalent, making them 
unusable in many applications.  To sign a mail with 1Mb attachment in 
pure Tcl takes 16s for the SHA1 alone.  Improving that by one order of 
magnitude - which a function like "string foreach" may be able to do - 
would make SHA1 usable for real-world applications.  Bignum support has 
already brought pure-Tcl RSA performance to around 50% that of C (basic 
square-and-multiply algorithm) showing that a bit of framework support 
can make all the difference.

I like Donal's suggestion of a scripted mock-up - I've already started 
looking at it and noticed that some algorithms favour a character 
representation for the iteration variable while others favour an int - 
an immediate API complication.

Regards,
Trevor


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