🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1992Nov17.112551.10920@uklirb.informatik.uni-kl.de> kirchner@uklira.informatik.uni-kl.de (Reinhard Kirchner) writes:

   There are often VERY USEFULL things in the hardware, but now
   programming language supports them. This is mostly the case in the
   field of numerics, like
   - long integer product, as shown by Bob,
   - the carry, the major incredient to build a 'long' arithmetic
   - rounding control, needed to generate verified results ( not a mode bit! )

True, they are occasionally useful.

   What bothers me even more is the fact that modern processors are
   designed to support only things that can be used by HLL, mainly C,
   because statistics show no use of other features ( what else ), and
   so we find ourselves severley limited by a chicken and egg problem.

I suspect most people (including myself) are actually perfectly happy
with 32bit integers and 32bit/64bit floating point numbers with any
reasonable kind of rounding mode. The main limits that users are
coming up against are probably 32bit address limits (of course, if you
go to 64bit addresses, you need 64bit integers for indexing).

It is not very hard to provide access to such features from high-level
languages, through things that look and behave like library calls but
are actually recognized and inlined by the compiler ("sincos(a,s,c)",
"add_with_carry(result,arg1,arg2)", ...). If you are really interested
in this, I recommend that you work within NCEG (or other language
standards committees) to make proposals for what library primitives
might be useful. On the other hand, please do spare the rest of us
complex syntactic extensions ("!<>", "?)~", etc.) for all those
special purpose features.

					Thomas.