🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <902@aber-cs.UUCP> pcg@cs.aber.ac.uk (Piercarlo Grandi) writes:
....
>The 68020 has more registers than the 386, but this ought to count for
>little, as according to literature the knee of the curve for C is before or
>at 4 registers (important note: for typical Unix utilities, e.g. excluding
>floating point) because of the average simplicity of C expressions.

Could you post the specific reference, with detail about what the circumstances
that led to this conclusion?
	1) It is very easy to generate such a conclusion for a specific
	machine & compiler combination, such that the conclusion is totally
	irrelevant to other combinations.  For example, I once saw a statement
	that data on a PDP-10 said that the compilers seldom used more than
	15 registers.....well, a PDP-10 has 16 registers....
	2) Good optimizing compilers make the number go up; in any case,
	the number 4 seems a bit low for a generic number.
-- 
-john mashey	DISCLAIMER: <generic disclaimer, I speak for me only, etc>
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