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From: barmar@think.com (Barry Margolin)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: Computers for users not programmers
Message-ID: <1991Feb12.192725.21029@Think.COM>
Date: 12 Feb 91 19:27:25 GMT
References: <3159:Feb1213:56:3091@kramden.acf.nyu.edu>
Sender: news@Think.COM
Organization: Thinking Machines Corporation, Cambridge MA, USA
Lines: 23

In article <3159:Feb1213:56:3091@kramden.acf.nyu.edu> brnstnd@kramden.acf.nyu.edu (Dan Bernstein) writes:
>Some people think that if Fortran and C don't support an operation, it's
>a waste to put the operation into new chips. They're wrong. Just because
>language designers make mistakes doesn't mean those mistakes should last
>forever.

My guess (based on no hard evidence) is that Fortran and C are used for at
least 75% of systems and scientific programming, and this will almost
certainly be true for the lifetime of the coming generation of processors.
In this case, it makes sense for chips to be designed with those languages
in mind, since they aren't going away soon no matter how many mistakes the
language designers made (technical superiority hardly ever wins in this
business -- consider how many systems running IBM's horrible mainframe OSes
there are).  Yes, that means that the small minority of programs that can
make use of other operations will not be optimized as well.  But if 50% of
all programs double in speed while 10% are halved in speed (I think I'm
exxagerating the numbers in both directions), and the rest stay about the
same, and CPU prices also go down, that's a large overall gain.
--
Barry Margolin, Thinking Machines Corp.

barmar@think.com
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