Re: Native Complex numbers for LuaJIT-2 [was Re: Benchmark shootout shows LuaJIT 2.0]

[Sam Roberts <vieuxtech@...>]

On Mon, Nov 2, 2009 at 5:24 AM, Leo Razoumov <slonik.az@gmail.com> wrote:
> On 2009-11-01, Mike Pall <mikelu-0911@mike.de> wrote:
> By beating Fortran in few instances and coming reasonably close to
> C/C++ performance on numerics LuaJIT-2 is becoming a viable candidate
> for heavy number crunching applications.
>
> How difficult it is to add native Complex numbers to LuaJIT (C-99 compatible)?
> By native I mean as little overhead over lua_Number as possible.

What do people use complex numbers for?

I'm baffled, me and two guys sitting near me, all with engineering
degrees, did lots of pen and paper
work with complex numbers in university, but I don't recall ever
seeing an algorithm that would benefit
from being coded, and I've never, in my 15+ years since graduation,
seen any code that uses complex
numbers.

And yet... they keep appearing in the C standards, and now on the lua list...

What are you guys using them for?

Cheers,
Sam