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From: hrubin@pop.stat.purdue.edu (Herman Rubin)
Newsgroups: comp.arch,comp.lang.misc
Subject: Re: Computers for users not programmers
Message-ID: <5437@mentor.cc.purdue.edu>
Date: 8 Feb 91 13:47:31 GMT
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In article <27B19A39.321E@tct.uucp>, chip@tct.uucp (Chip Salzenberg) writes:
> According to hrubin@pop.stat.purdue.edu (Herman Rubin):
> >There is the mistaken view that hardware should be designed to particular
> >languages, and never mind that some programs may be many times slower
> >because of the lack of particular instructions.
> 
> Machines have been designed for efficient execution in the most common
> cases.  If the most common cases are compiled C and Fortran programs,
> optimizing the hardware for those cases is only natural.
> 
> Remember, Herman, your instruction mix is radically atypical.

It is atypical only in that I have a fair idea of what hardware instructions
can do and I can see how to use them.  The person taught programming by
learning Fortran or Pascal or C cannot possibly see this, and as is often
the case in other fields (mathematics and statistics in particular), knowing
procedures makes understanding far more difficult, at least.

Do you mean to tell me that computations involving both integers and 
floating-point numbers are not important?  Or that dividing floats by
floats, obtaining an integer quotient and a floating remainder, likewise?
That particular step is the first step of any trigonometric or exponential
function computation when it is not known in advance that the argument is
small.  There are other periodic and related functions for which this is
useful.  It would also speed up interpolation, etc.

On a slightly different, but related, tack, posters have been asking about
JOVIAL.  One of my late colleagues, who worked on it, told me that when
the top-notch programmers found that assembler was desirable, the language
people tried very hard to produce a fix making that particular use of
assembler unnecessary.
--
Herman Rubin, Dept. of Statistics, Purdue Univ., West Lafayette IN47907-1399
Phone: (317)494-6054
hrubin@l.cc.purdue.edu (Internet, bitnet)   {purdue,pur-ee}!l.cc!hrubin(UUCP)