Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!yale!cmcl2!kramden.acf.nyu.edu!brnstnd
From: brnstnd@kramden.acf.nyu.edu (Dan Bernstein)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.misc
Subject: Re: How to make a language downward-extensible?
Message-ID: <13549:Oct1800:31:5490@kramden.acf.nyu.edu>
Date: 18 Oct 90 00:31:54 GMT
References: <1990Oct2.024511.10082@cbnewsc.att.com> <899:Oct800:50:3590@kramden.acf.nyu.edu> <1990Oct8.034201.2631@murdoch.acc.Virginia.EDU>
Organization: IR
Lines: 18

In article <1990Oct8.034201.2631@murdoch.acc.Virginia.EDU> gl8f@astsun9.astro.Virginia.EDU (Greg Lindahl) writes:
> That's funny, the FORTRAN community wrote standards for vector
> processing quite a while ago. You have the BLAS libraries, you have
> the future F9X, and oddly enough Cray seems to have little trouble
> writing a compiler which totally vectorizes my hydrodynamics code
> which is written in portable fortran.

Same for Convex---but since each compiler vendor gives the programmer a
different way to indicate vectorization, the efficiency itself isn't
portable. You're right, though, that vectorization is a bad example.

But the argument still makes sense. ``Some extensions, like very fast
pythagorean sums, won't be standardized for a very, very long time.
Does that mean the programmer shouldn't be able to write code that will
take advantage of pythagorean sums when they're around? Does it mean
that all such code must be unportable?''

---Dan