hrubin@pop.stat.purdue.edu (Herman Rubin) (03/01/91)
In article <5412:Mar107:10:0491@kramden.acf.nyu.edu>, brnstnd@kramden.acf.nyu.edu (Dan Bernstein) writes: ......................... > And this is completely useless. I've said this before, and I'll say it > again: I cannot wait for language designers to catch up. I need to be > able to write efficient, portable code NOW, not in ten years when a > better language is widely available. I fully sympathize with you, but neither you nor I will be able to write efficient, portable code NOW. We both WANT to, but I see no reasonable prospect of this in the near future. What I believe can be done in the near future is to produce a totally non-optimizing macro translator, and let the user and compiler/assembler do the optimizing afterwards. This is within present knowledge. But if the operations one wishes to use are not even known by the language, and cannot be added to it, even reasonable code cannot be written. Followups to comp.lang.misc, please. This is not a hardware problem, although I suspect that hardware would change to take into account these instructions, now totally disregarded. -- Herman Rubin, Dept. of Statistics, Purdue Univ., West Lafayette IN47907-1399 Phone: (317)494-6054 hrubin@l.cc.purdue.edu (Internet, bitnet) {purdue,pur-ee}!l.cc!hrubin(UUCP)