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From: aglew@urbsdc.Urbana.Gould.COM
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: Common Compilers for benchmarks (wa
Message-ID: <28200230@urbsdc>
Date: 5 Nov 88 21:43:00 GMT
References: <26627@ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU>
Lines: 46
Nf-ID: #R:ucbvax.BERKELEY.EDU:26627:urbsdc:28200230:000:2224
Nf-From: urbsdc.Urbana.Gould.COM!aglew    Nov  5 15:43:00 1988


>It looks to me as though many of the newer machines are designed with
>C and Fortran *only* in mind.  That's just a comment from someone who
>reads the manuals:  could anyone who really knows say to what extent
>ADA and COBOL were studied _when the arhictectures were being designed_?
>(And no, I am not suggesting that RISCs should have special EDIT
>instructions like the /370, B6700, or VAX.  I just don't see discussion
>in the manuals along the lines of here are the pieces you need for the
>following ADA or COBOL constructs.)

Well, I know of one company that did a study of what would be necessary
to support COBOL well on a hypothetical 64 bit RISC. (No, it's not
my current my employer, nor was it the last machine my last employer
built).

The guy who did the study was ex-NCR, and pretty familiar
with commercial and TP issues.

His conclusions? No need for special EDITPC instructions. BCD might
have been good, but arithmetic on BCD treated as binary could be done
and corrected fast enough. But the biggest win was simply that
most of the commercial data items, strings et al., fit into a 64 bit
register, and so could be manipulated all at once. Fixed field length
COBOL records can be handled quite naturally by a vector architecture
that wants things to be fixed length - better than C variable length
strings.

Overall: a large word size scientific processor is a *damned* good
COBOL engine, if you can spend the money to get a good COBOL 
compiler written, and if you have the I/O and O/S facilities.


Andy "Krazy" Glew. 
at: Motorola Microcomputer Division, Champaign-Urbana Development Center
    (formerly Gould CSD Urbana Software Development Center).
mail: 1101 E. University, Urbana, Illinois 61801, USA.
email: (Gould addresses will persist for a while)
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My opinions are my own, and are not the opinions of my employer, or any
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