Subject: Response to Berryman's comments

From: [email-masked] (Cherri Pancake)
Date: Thu, 11 Mar 93 11:35:25 PST

Scott says (and I love his "\begin{flame}") --
        While I tend to 
        think that there should be some way to figure out how to use 
        MPI in one sitting, I certainly do not think that we should 
        be "maximizing ease of use" as the principle design goal. 
and then
        even if MPI turns into a huge, ugly mass of routines, it should still 
        be possible to isolate a few of these routines and present them 
        as the "simple subset" for people who don't need to drive their 
        communication costs down. I don't see "limiting the size of" being 
        the same as "making easy to use". 

It's certainly try that ease-of-use does not necessarily mean a small
number of routines.  Ease-of-use is more dependent on:
  a) If there are subsets, there must be subsets that can function as
        a reasonal mini-language, in the sense that applications can
        be developed using just those routines - and getting reasonable
        performance.
  b) There must be syntactic/semantic consistency both among routines
        in a subset and across subset boundaries.  Otherwise, users will
        not be able to learn subsets incrementally with any ease.
  c) Perhaps most importantly, the names of routines, order and type of
        arguments, and user-level semantics (by which I mean what can
        go wrong with respect to the user program) must be consistent
	and as simple as possible.

Cherri