[net.lang.c] inline assembler functions, and other matters

doug@hcr.UUCP (Doug Moen) (03/28/84)

Structure comparison should *not* be put into C.
The thing would be a massive kludge; it wouldn't work for <, >, etc;
it wouldn't work for structures that contain unions; and it would frequently
do the wrong thing if your structure contained anything but ints or floats --
you'd have to do it by hand anyway.

It's silly to say that an important use of register variables is to tell
your (optimizing) compiler that you won't be taking the address of a variable.
It should be easy for a globally optimizing compiler to determine this
for itself.

Finally, I like Donn Seeleys suggestion to add a facility for declaring
inline assembler functions.  This is a distinct improvement over the practice
of putting asm("bletch"); in the middle of a program.  It would make it
possible for such routines as 'strcpy' to be implemented as efficient
inline code, more or less transparently to the users.

{decvax,ihnp4,watmath,utcsrgv}!hcr!doug