Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!mailrus!uwmcsd1!leah!itsgw!steinmetz!uunet!portal!cup.portal.com!bcase
From: bcase@cup.portal.com
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: Software Distribution
Message-ID: <8755@cup.portal.com>
Date: 4 Sep 88 03:39:46 GMT
References: <22778@amdcad.AMD.COM> <965@esunix.UUCP>
Organization: The Portal System (TM)
Lines: 13
XPortal-User-Id: 1.1001.5156

Re:  architectural emulation

|The problems come from incompatable data formats, addressing modes,
|and high level operations. Most modern computers use 8 bit bytes and
|support 16 and 32 bit twos complement integers so there isn't much of
|a problem there. Floating point, packed decimal, and fixed point might
|cause some problems.

Ha ha!  I wish the problem were as easy as "most modern computers use 8
bit bytes ... so there isn't much of a problem there."  Alignment and
byte-sex incompatibilities can make it not worth the trouble.  Floating-
point can indeed be a problem:  try making extendeds run fast on a
machine that doesn't support them....  (SPARC does, does anyone else?)