andy@rocky.UUCP (11/20/87)
In article <6743@apple.UUCP>, bcase@apple.UUCP (Brian Case) writes: > I am not trying to pigeon-hole people or sound negative in any > way, but in general, I find that Europeans tend to have a real sympathy > for run-time checking. I can't name one American, off the top of my > head, to whom I would attribute the same concern. At least the concern > would not, to me, be the distinguishing feature that, to me, it so often > is in Europeans. Lisp machines (MIT style, as in Symbolics and LMI, and I think Xerox D-machines as well) all have run-time checking for things like integer overflow, can a specific pointer operation be performed with a given value, etc. As Tom Knight (Symbolics and MIT in the CADR days) says: "The addition of small amounts of special purpose hardware to conventional machines increases the efficiency of Lisp systems with dynamic type checks." I think SPARC has some support for tags. Patterson has mentioned similar things, but I don't remember whether they made it into RISC-II. Didn't Burroughs use hardware for tag checking too? -andy -- Andy Freeman UUCP: {arpa gateways, decwrl, sun, hplabs, rutgers}!sushi.stanford.edu!andy ARPA: andy@sushi.stanford.edu (415) 329-1718/723-3088 home/cubicle