🚀 go-pugleaf

Hello.

I attended an Alpha exhibition hosted by Japan DEC near Tokyo Disneyland.

I had a chance to talk to someone who worked on Alpha compiler such as
C and Fortran (and presumably BLISS, too).
He said ALPHA doesn't have a byte manipulation instruction. Eh,
rather, he said its memory access is done in only 32 bit or 64 bit. So
character manipulation has to be done by word access, and then masking
and operation.

I know it is possible, but wouldn't it be a little clumsy to
manipulate character data on Alpha? (On the other hand, the demo
running on Alpha was running just excellent, so the overhead of added
instructions for manipulating character data is not much when you have
100-150 mips...)

What is this MACRO-32 compiler? If my memory serves, wasn't it VAX
macro assembler?  Have you written a assembly-to-assembly translator?
DEC told us that there is a binary code translator (VAX-to-Alpha, and
MIPS-to-Alpha. Very interesting.)

Happy Hacking,

 Chiaki Ishikawa,  Personal Media Corp.,  MY Bldg, 1-7-7 Hiratsuka,
 Shinagawa, Tokyo 142, JAPAN. FAX:+81-3-5702-0359, Phone:+81-3-5702-0351
 UUNET: ishikawa@personal-media.co.jp