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From: narten@purdue.ARPA (Thomas Narten)
Newsgroups: net.unix-wizards
Subject: Re: Weird code
Message-ID: <2377@brl-tgr.ARPA>
Date: Thu, 24-Oct-85 09:33:53 EDT
Article-I.D.: brl-tgr.2377
Posted: Thu Oct 24 09:33:53 1985
Date-Received: Fri, 25-Oct-85 04:44:54 EDT
Sender: news@brl-tgr.ARPA
Lines: 16

>I've always felt that this is a real kludge in 4.2 that is very
>machine and even compiler dependent.  I wonder why globals were
>not defined for this purpose.  Oh well, this is only one of my
>irritations with 4.2's driver environment.

Blatant machine and compiler dependencies are not limited to driver or
even kernel code! The following line appears in the middle of ld.c with
no comments anywhere explaining what is going on.

		asm("movc3 r8,(r11),(r7)");

At the very least, an ``ifdef vax'' would be appropriate. How would you
like to port this kind of undocumented stuff to a new machine?

Thomas Narten
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