Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!rutgers!ames!oliveb!sun!shukra!ram
From: ram%shukra@Sun.COM (Renu Raman, Sun Microsystems)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: taken -vs- untaken branches, Fo
Message-ID: <38390@sun.uucp>
Date: 10 Jan 88 18:10:55 GMT
References: <839@ima.ISC.COM> <28200085@ccvaxa>
Sender: news@sun.uucp
Reply-To: ram@sun.UUCP (Renu Raman, Sun Microsystems)
Organization: Sun Microsystems, Mountain View
Lines: 29

In article <28200085@ccvaxa> aglew@ccvaxa.UUCP writes:
>
>..> The Fortran FREQUENCY statement:
>..>   John Levine (paraphrased) says that the lesson is that the programmer 
>..>   should not provide the frequency hints, the system should.
>
>I would rather that you had said "the system should be able to",
>but "the programmer can if he really wants to".
>
>First, a high level directive like FREQUENCY can be generated either
>by the programmer or automatically by the language system, so why not
>make this functionality available to the programmer?

     Any day, programmer "over-drive" is better (any examples to the
     contrary?).  It also serves as a very good pedagogical tool
     be it optimization, vectorization or parallelization.  Now,
     [digressing from the main topic]
     I only wish these compilers have an "explain" feature too
     so that it can make programmers write better programs than
     leave everything to the compilers. [maybe this belongs to
     comp.software-eng or comp.compilers]

>Andy "Krazy" Glew. Gould CSD-Urbana.    1101 E. University, Urbana, IL 61801   

---------------------
   Renukanthan Raman				ARPA:ram@sun.com
   Sun Microsystems			UUCP:{ucbvax,seismo,hplabs}!sun!ram
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