🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <653@ctycal.UUCP> ingoldsb@ctycal.UUCP (Terry Ingoldsby) writes:

   It seems to me that the only way your crusade for bit distance will ever be
   successful is to show the general utility of such functions.  Otherwise, no
   matter how interesting (to you), you will not get these features.

Are we talking about "find first one" here?

Find first one was a pretty useful instruction in our lisp compiler.
In fact, we figured we could speed the thing up a LOT by moving to the
Amiga and using the blitter to do bitmask stuff (which we wanted (a)
for closure algorithms and (b) for resource allocation).

A lot of CPU seems to get expended on variable length data encoding
around here. I haven't examined the code myself but it sounds like it
would come up there.

It's a notoriously useful thing for resource allocation in operating
systems, too.

I've surely wanted this more often than, say, floating point addition.

Of course, there are always other data representations, and so long as
the hardware people take the attitude that computers are for fluid
dynamics and to hell with compilers, operating systems and databases
(who uses computers for THAT stuff anyway? :-)....

Lotsa smilies.
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stephen p spackman         Center for Information and Language Studies
systems analyst                                  University of Chicago
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