🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <1990Feb19.155810.29127@jarvis.csri.toronto.edu>, cks@white.toronto.edu (Chris Siebenmann) writes:
> 
> |    When something is simple and mechanical, why not let the computer
> |    do the drudge work?
> | 
> | I tend to agree in principle. In practice, things are less clear
> | cut.  To make use of profling and heuristic information, the
> | compiler has to run complex analysis and optimizing modules. This
> | is *bad*. The beauty of things like 'register' is that they are
> | absolutely safe and effective, without any analysis whatsoever.
> 
>  One danger of having only programmer-level hints is that quite a few
> programmers will add wrong hints, or change their programs such that
> hints become incorrect. The only way to make sure that the hints are
> correct is to make their gathering and use automatic or nearly so.

     Not to mention that programmers are not omniscient, and a good
programmer's best hints aren't enough.  FORTRAN may not be a fashionable
language among computer scientists, but twenty years of improvement has
yielded highly optimizing mainframe compilers that generally can't be
beat by hand-coded assembly language.  And on unusual architectures, it
is often a nightmare for a programmer to figure out an efficient use of
the machine's resources.  For example, on a Cray, FORTRAN is presently
the only way to make efficient use of the machine's resources.  Cray
Unix may be "hot" now, but C brings the machines to their knees.

 -David Hinds
  dhinds@popserver.stanford.edu