Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!bloom-beacon!mit-eddie!uw-beaver!uw-june!pardo
From: pardo@june.cs.washington.edu (David Keppel)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: hardware for late-binding languages (Was: negative addresses)
Message-ID: <4926@june.cs.washington.edu>
Date: 16 May 88 04:05:41 GMT
References: <11571@ut-sally.UUCP> <28200145@urbsdc> <11618@ut-sally.UUCP> <493@cmx.npac.syr.edu>
Reply-To: pardo@uw-june.UUCP (David Keppel)
Organization: U of Washington, Computer Science, Seattle
Lines: 20

billo@cmx.npac.syr.edu (Bill O'Farrell) writes:
[late-binding languages]
>In fact, using such languages has the beneficial effect of encouraging
>the design of hardware better suited to higher-level language
>implementation -- example: lisp machines.

I like architectures to support late-binding languages.  A relavent
note, however:  I saw a video by somebody from Symbolics (the video is
a year or more old, I think).  During the Q&A section, one of the
questions was something along the line of "how much faster does a
program run on a machine w/ hardware support?"  His answer was
essentially that if you had a fixed program (e.g., you weren't trying
to debug it), that compiler technology would give you a program that
ran just as fast on an architecture w/o support for late-binding
languages.  The real wins of the extra hardware, he said, were during
development, etc.

Any comments on this?

	;-D on  ( Hardware for Softwears )  Pardo