🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1992Nov17.121528.28783@syacus.acus.oz.au> ian@syacus.acus.oz.au (Ian Joyner) writes:

   Well, I won't forget it. It is the purpose of computer hardware to run
   software. It is not the purpose of software to be crippled by the
   compromises and limitations of current generation hardware.

   So hardware design must be dictated by software considerations, not
   vice versa, as is so apparent in languages like C.

Actually, sadly, C dictates hardware design these days. I have heard
chip designers for some of the latest, greatest chip sets coming soon
to a workstation near you say "oh, we did this and that because many C
programs assume it; we would really have liked to do this
differently". Most of these are related to how characters, integer
sizes, and pointers interact in the minds of most C programmers.  C's
lack (in fact, intolerance) of runtime typing and array bounds
checking, on the other hand, mean that hardware designers these days
seem to make little effort to support such features, and the
assumptions of C programmers about power-of-two word sizes make it
nearly impossible even to find room for bits to store such information
in. IEEE floating point is another example where (allegedly) software
considerations drove hardware design, with results that aren't quite
as bad as in the case of C.

					Thomas.