[J3] [EXTERNAL] Re: Re: Slides available for your preview - Part 2 of the Generics Tutorial today at the J3 plenary

[Van Snyder]

On Tue, 2021-03-09 at 14:02 +0000, Clune, Thomas L. (GSFC-6101) wrote:
> Anton,
> 
> It is not that parameterized modules cannot address the use
> cases.      The problem is simply that the list of template
> parameters at that level is the union of all template parameters used
> by the actual templated entities contained therein.     

This sounds like an artifact of a careless design.

If one needs to get only a bit of stuff from a parameterized module,
and it's tangled with a lot of other stuff, the parameterized module
was designed incorrectly.

Is the "plethora of parameters" problem an artifact of mashing together
things that aren't really related, or an artifact of extending
something by adding somthing else, that needs the same parameters, and
a few others?

It seems to me that this could be addressed by instantiating simpler
parameterized modules within a parameterized module, to make a
synthesis of several.

I agree that one might get a "combinatorial explosion." If one has N
parameterized modules, each with a roughly-independent but slightly-
overlapping set of parameters, there are 2^N ways to combine them into
yet another parameterized module. Actually probably somewhat less,
because of overlap. If there's no overlap, there's no reason to package
the smaller bits together.

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