🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <TMB.92Nov19002135@arolla.idiap.ch>, tmb@arolla.idiap.ch (Thomas
M. Breuel) wrote:
> 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.

If you could elaborate on what these are, I'm sure that many of us would
find that an interesting topic to discuss.

> 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,

I don't see anything wrong with getting rid of features that people aren't
using.  If those features were popular, C probably wouldn't be as popular
as it is today.  We have lots of CISC archetectures with cool features that
very few people ever find useful.  Why waste the silicon?

It's simply a feedback loop.  I much prefer it to having hardware and
software people totally oblivious to each other.
___
NEVIN ":-)" LIBER, RISC Porting Specialist/Blue Meanie, Mac System Software
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