[Snowball-discuss] Local variables for snowball

[Richard Boulton]

On Mon, Sep 11, 2006 at 12:11:50PM +0100, Olly Betts wrote:
> The first cut of a patch to implement this is here (including an update
> for the Snowball manual):
> 
> http://oligarchy.co.uk/xapian/patches/snowball-local-variables.patch
> 
> So far I've done integers and booleans, but not strings as they're a
> little more work.

> Does this language extension seem suitable for inclusion?  If so, I'll
> add support for strings and see if I can get the Java code generator to
> implement it too.

I have no particular objection to this patch.  On the other hand, I can't
see any performance difference so far between the patched version and the
non-patched version.  I agree with your logic as to why it might improve
performance, but evaluations trump logic!  Of course, it's quite possible
that a difference would be seen if you extended this to strings, or it's
possible that my sample vocabulary (voc.txt repeated 10 times) isn't
sufficiently representative, etc...

If you want to do the work, and Martin has no objection, I'd be happy to
include this, since local variables could make the snowball code neater in
some cases, anyway.

Now, if _everything_ could be made into a local variable, so that the
routines could be called in a multithreaded environment without needing
locking or per-thread stemmer objects, I'd be _very_ interested. ;-)

(Incidentally, note that I've just committed a patch to allow all the
snowball code to compile with a C++ compiler as well as a C compiler.  Your
patch still applies, just about.)

-- 
Richard