Newsgroups: comp.arch Path: utzoo!henry From: henry@utzoo.uucp (Henry Spencer) Subject: incremental compilation and code as data Message-ID: <1989May1.213448.11347@utzoo.uucp> Organization: U of Toronto Zoology References: <89@ <46500061@uxe.cso.uiuc.edu> Date: Mon, 1 May 89 21:34:48 GMT In article <46500061@uxe.cso.uiuc.edu> mcdonald@uxe.cso.uiuc.edu writes: >I have been having a moderately heated (for Usenet, especially >for comp.lang.c) discussion with Doug Gwyn about architectures >(hardware or software) that prevent a given program from >accessing the same information as both code and data. The context of >the discussion is that I want(ed) the ANSI C standard to REQUIRE >that one be able to access a given object as both data and code. >He seems to think that this is a "Bad Idea". I think it is not >only a "Good Idea", but that it is vitally important to some of my >programs... Without having seen the discussion, that I recall, I think Doug's views are probably being misrepresented here. What he probably was saying was not that it's a bad idea, but that not all machines do it, and the ones that do it often have private wrinkles in just how it should be done, so *relying* on it is a bad idea. Incremental compilation is clearly important for a general-purpose machine. But not everybody realized that, and not everybody was originally trying to build general-purpose machines. -- Mars in 1980s: USSR, 2 tries, | Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology 2 failures; USA, 0 tries. | uunet!attcan!utzoo!henry henry@zoo.toronto.edu