>>>>> "DS" == Dan Sugalski <dan@sidhe.org> writes: DS> At 01:54 PM 9/9/2001 -0700, Wizard wrote: >> Just curious, would it be practical to design-in a boolean-specific >> register/set of registers? There are many processors (PICC, 8051, etc.) >> which would likely be better able utilize their own optimizations if this >> were the case ( bitset, testbit, high, low, etc.). It could be done without >> the register(s), but implementation would be much more straight-forward. DS> Could you go into more detail? I'm not sure what you're getting at DS> here, but it sounds potentially interesting. i think this is conflating the VM registers and the cpu registers. parrot is in c and there is a fair amount of code between the boolean parrot op code and the single machine instruction that can do a boolean like that. in a c compiler that is a good idea, use the special cpu instructions. in fact parrot will use them only because the c compiler for the architecture you are on will generate those instructions. but having parrot op codes map to special instructions makes sense only if we are doing some form of machine instruction generation as with JIT or TIL. then that becomes an optimization that can be applied during that machine code generation. but at the stage we are at with parrot, it is not applicable. uri -- Uri Guttman --------- uri@sysarch.com ---------- http://www.sysarch.com SYStems ARCHitecture and Stem Development ------ http://www.stemsystems.com Search or Offer Perl Jobs -------------------------- http://jobs.perl.orgThread Previous | Thread Next