Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!uunet!auspex!guy
From: guy@auspex.auspex.com (Guy Harris)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: Architecture questions
Message-ID: <4043@auspex.auspex.com>
Date: 10 Sep 90 17:14:05 GMT
References: <2516@l.cc.purdue.edu> <6838.26e7f109@vax1.tcd.ie> <2531@l.cc.purdue.edu>
Organization: Auspex Systems, Santa Clara
Lines: 16

>Text processing, for anyone who needs more than ASCII, is in a very primitive
>state.  Even ASCII processing is limited.  Again, hardware instructions would
>help.

Such as?

>There are quite a few situations in transaction processing which could use a
>few intelligent instructions, like reading from a buffer with an automatic
>interrupt when the buffer becomes empty.

"Reading from a buffer" in what sense?  Is this just an in-memory buffer
being read by a transaction processing application - in which case I
don't see how an *interrupt* would help, as a dumb old conditional
branch testing whether the number of characters left in the buffer was
zero would probably be *faster* than an interrupt (no tons of context so
save, etc.), or is it something else?