David Hanley wrote:
>
> <snip>
>
> Ok, so you found one example on one CPU. Great. Do you have any
> others?
> Because when you say 'cpu's XXX' it means that most or all cpu's have
> that
> feature. But there's more..
Learn your grammar. cpu's is the singular posesive. To prove his point
all he has to do is give one example. It is a bit much to ask him to
give examples for a majority of the CPU's available on the market.
>
> >
> > C is _not_ the be-all, end-all of programming languages and C is _not_ the
> > universal assembler that some would like it to be. that you cannot even
> > put this instruction to use without a lot of prior work that you also have
> > a hard time doing in C, shows that the SPARC designers thought of more than
> > increasingly myopic C crowd.
>
> I would think it's better to be myopic than to have your eyes shut.
> The fact is, most newer chips are not designed for lisp at all. The
> basic
> operations certianly are not based on type.
>
He did not claim that CPU's were designed for Lisp. He claimed that they
were not exclusively designed for C. I would not be surprised to find
that there are instructions that Cobol or Ada, but not C, could use, or
instructions that an OS could use which has no C equivalent. And he did
not claim that any additional instructions that other languages might
use, and C could not use, involved types, other things could involve
garbage collecting, certain forms of exception handling, etc.
As a side point, does anyone know if the newer "Java" chips have
instructions that check types?
> <snip>
--
William B. Clodius Phone: (505)-665-9370
Los Alamos Nat. Lab., NIS-2 FAX: (505)-667-3815
PO Box 1663, MS-C323 Group office: (505)-667-5776
Los Alamos, NM 87545 Email: wclodius@lanl.gov
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