🚀 go-pugleaf

In article ... hrubin@pop.stat.purdue.edu (Herman Rubin) writes:

   Some of these allow some flexibility in expression syntax.  But how
   many of these could conveniently unpack a floating point number into
   its exponent and mantissa?  In particular, could you write

	   exponent, mantissa =.U float

In Pop, you could write

	floating_thing.Hermans_dismantle -> (exponent, mantissa)

so long as you'd defined Hermans_dismantle somewhere as a procedure with the
appropriate effect. 

At the moment, you'd have to hack the Pop compiler to make this generate
in-line code. If there was a machine instruction to do the job, I should
imagine this might take the compiler-writer, oh, half-an-hour or so. Then
there's the rest of the week for documenting, porting, testing, checking, and
justifying the extension to Pop users who'd rather have an even faster garbage
collector. 
--

Regards,    | "Layered protocols give the software implementor a chance to
Kers.       | ruin his performance in each layer." - Don Gillies