CoCoA » CoCoALib

Mario asked about gathering stats for his involutive basis code.

I suggested using a struct to keep all the stats stuff together.

Why a struct rather than a class? Not entirely sure; a struct seems simpler: by having all data members public any code can increment counters etc.. With a class it would probably be necessary to have lots of one line functions (at least one to increment a counter, and another to read the counter), yet without any obvious gain.

Anyway, we can try first with a struct; if that proves not to be as easy/clean as hoped then it should be easy to switch to a class.

I suppose Mario ought to write about this. He has followed my design suggestion, and seems to be happy with it. If it continues to work well, perhaps we should consider adapting the GBMill stats gatherer to work in a similar way.

After speaking to Mario we felt that it was appropriate to have separate mechanisms for gathering stats and for producing progress/logging info. The GBMill implementation seems to have both combined (see TmpGRStats.H). I also note that the counters in the GBMill impl are unsigned int; it would probably be better to replace them with long (or possibly unsigned long) since unsigned int may be limited to 2^32.