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From: hrubin@pop.stat.purdue.edu (Herman Rubin)
Newsgroups: comp.arch,comp.lang.misc
Subject: Re: standard extensions
Message-ID: <6703@mentor.cc.purdue.edu>
Date: 23 Feb 91 20:55:48 GMT
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In article <3381.27c548c3@iccgcc.decnet.ab.com>, herrickd@iccgcc.decnet.ab.com (daniel lance herrick) writes:
> 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:

			.......................

> > 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.

You are almost right about its size; something of this complexity needs
at least two people working on it to avoid first class goofs.  But it is
not appropriate for a PhD thesis.  It is a contribution, but not particularly
research, which is the criterion for a thesis and for tenure.  The current
pressure for students in academia is to avoid what is not either required
or directly needed for their thesis research and overconcentrate.

The project can be done by a faculty member whose academic reputation is
essentially assured with the help of a graduate student or two.  Someone
like Wirth can get the funding and the students.  Someone like me has a
small chance to get the funding, and real difficulty in getting the students.

> 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.

This WAS obvious when languages were first started.  Fortran had a
limited purpose, but not Algol.  It is syntactically more difficult,
but a purpose of a language is to make it easier for the user to
use the hardware, and the hardware could do this on the great bulk
of machines then.
--
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)