🚀 go-pugleaf

  Well, it looks like for instructions and data with the current
technologies, alignment of data makes good sense and architectural
support for misaligned accesses is not a good use for silicon.

  But what about in the communications realm?  Current packet
formats are rather heavily "packed", sufficiently so that one wants
to treat them as collections of bits of various lengths (usually
even, often powers of two, etc).

  Two possibilities arise:
	Communications will be pushing physical transmission-speed
limits and central processors will continue to get faster, faster.
With processor time available for unpacking, packets will be
densely packed,
   or
	Processing speeds will peak out sooner than transmission
speeds in the near term, and there will be a need to design
communications packet formats so they **aren't** an
expanding-opcode scheme.  In this scenario I'm not suggesting any
holes are likely to appear, but I do expect most of the fields at
the beginning of the (outer!) packet will be of fixed size and
unchanging interpretation.

  Would anyone with very-high-speed comms experience care to comment
on the ratio of development speeds?  And does special-purpose
hardware make any sense in this context...

--dave
-- 
 David Collier-Brown.  | yunexus!lethe!dave
 Interleaf Canada Inc. |
 1550 Enterprise Rd.   | He's so smart he's dumb.
 Mississauga, Ontario  |       --Joyce C-B