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From: chuck@pluto.Harris-ATD.com (Chuck Musciano)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: IEEE arithmetic (Goldberg paper)
Message-ID: <6635@trantor.harris-atd.com>
Date: 29 Jun 91 19:38:05 GMT
References: <9106252305.AA27299@ucbvax.Berkeley.EDU> <1991Jun27.215747.5329@ingres.Ingres.COM>
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In article <1991Jun27.215747.5329@ingres.Ingres.COM>, jpk@Ingres.COM (Jon Krueger) writes:
> >    1.  I would not buy a compiler from someone who enjoys breaking
> >user code.
> 
> Neither would I.
> 
> But a compiler which exposes broken user code is a different animal.

     Oh, people who can break user code make the very best compiler
writers.  As every compiler writer knows (and I'm proud to call myself
one), the easy cases are the obvious cases.  The real work in a compiler
is in the borderline stuff, the strange combinations of language features,
the weird usages.  A person that is always thinking of the bizarre
situation that can break user code is just the person to work on a 
compiler, because they are thinking of those situations and making sure
the compiler can handle them.

     I can recall cases where we were designing a multiprocessor version
of Pascal, and someone wanted list processing primitives in the langauge.
I opposed them, favoring instead more atomic primitives that could be used
to construct list primitives.  Only by coming up with strange and unusual,
yet perfectly valid, usages could I convince the others that the atomic
way was the way to go.

-- 

Chuck Musciano				ARPA  : chuck@trantor.harris-atd.com
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