2 Sep
2008
2 Sep
'08
11:31 a.m.
I wrote:
> That sounds like the really hard way to write an
interpreter for the
> PDP-8. It would be much easier if you just pretend it's an 8-bit
> machine, and do 8-bit arithmetic, and 16-bit double precision, just as
> was done in the 6502 interpreter.
Ethan Dicks wrote:
I suppose there could be a code advantage in splitting
things up like
that, but I don't see much of a in-core storage advantage, unless you
pack, for example, 3 variables in 4 machine words (in which case, the
code could get fairly messy).
Not just messy. More code, and it would take longer to write and debug.
There's no point in making the task more complicated just to add some
unnecessary optimization.