Path: utzoo!utgpu!news-server.csri.toronto.edu!bonnie.concordia.ca!uunet!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!abvax!iccgcc!herrickd
From: herrickd@iccgcc.decnet.ab.com (daniel lance herrick)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: standard extensions
Message-ID: <3381.27c548c3@iccgcc.decnet.ab.com>
Date: 22 Feb 91 21:37:23 GMT
References: <1087@kaos.MATH.UCLA.EDU> <14814@lanl.gov> <1991Feb15.192653.9846@rice.edu> <6049@mentor.cc.purdue.edu>
Followup-To: comp.arch
Lines: 45

In article <6049@mentor.cc.purdue.edu>, hrubin@pop.stat.purdue.edu (Herman Rubin) writes:
> In article <1991Feb15.192653.9846@rice.edu>, preston@ariel.rice.edu (Preston Briggs) writes:
[i may have edited away all of preston's contributions to this line]
>> 
>> jlg@lanl.gov (Jim Giles) writes:
>> many people working on many ways of expressing and implementing
>> extensible languages.  "They" don't belong to a special club;
>> everyone is free to join.  It's very simple and fairly popular:
>> 
>>     while (dissatisfied) {
>> 	Design a language (perhaps an extension of another language)
>> 
>> 	Implement your language (perhaps hacking an existing compiler
>> 	or building an iterpreter).
>> 
>> 	Write many programs in your language to gain experience
>> 	with its limitations.  Try and get others to use it.
>>     }
> 
> This assumes that the one who needs the operations, or the
> improved performance, has the resources and time to do this.
> Montgomery and Silverman are number theorists, I am a professor
> of Statistics and Mathematics.  We are expected to do other
> things.
[much more edited away, this is only to remind of what went before]

You are faculty at one of the two schools with the oldest departments
of Computer Science in the country.  Go to your colleagues in CS and
tell them you have a design problem that seems to be about the right
size for a PhD.

If you can get them to cobble it together on gcc (or g++) you can
then profit from any improvements made later in the gnu code generator.
(And also portability to future computers.)

What has frosted me about the languages is that the arithmetic
operators are all single valued.  I usually want the quotient
and remainder from a division.  I have to tell the compiler to
give me the quotient and then tell it to give me the remainder.
It might be smart enough to notice that it gets both of them in
one machine operation, but if it is, it is only undoing bad language
design.

dan herrick
herrickd@iccgcc.decnet.ab.com


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