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From: ian@sibyl.eleceng.ua.OZ (Ian Dall)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: Compilers, architecture, and efficiency
Message-ID: <911@sibyl.eleceng.ua.OZ>
Date: 3 May 91 00:22:09 GMT
References: <1991Apr28.154603.8003@rice.edu> <1991Apr29.155945.29907@rice.edu> <1991Apr30.025904.13028@rice.edu> <11609@mentor.cc.purdue.edu>
Reply-To: ian@sibyl.OZ (Ian Dall)
Organization: Engineering, Uni of Adelaide, Australia
Lines: 29

In article <11609@mentor.cc.purdue.edu> hrubin@pop.stat.purdue.edu (Herman Rubin) writes:
>We, and I include all of mankind, do not know enough about to design a good
>system of communicating between people and computers now.  We can design a
>fair one by realizing this and allowing the users to extend the language, and
>to communicate to the compiler this extension.

This is available. The best example I can think of is gcc/g++. I seem to
recall someone (Chris Torek?) posting an example of gcc asm's before in
this thread (or one of its many reincarnations).

If the machine has an instruction you can use it! Certainly the syntax
is a bit arcane, but you can't expect to "extend" a compiler without
some knowledge of both the machine language and the compiler. This
syntax need only be tackled once per function per machine. The results
of your efforts can be hidden inside macros or inline functions in
an include file. If you can find a few other people with like requirements,
you can share your effort.

Eventually your group might be able to settle on a proposal for a formal
standard. In short the tools are available now if you don't mind a little
effort.



-- 
Ian Dall          I'm not into isms, but hedonism is the most
                  harmless I can think of. -- Phillip Adams
  ACSnet: ian@sibyl.eleceng.ua.oz
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