On 07/02/2012 09:08 PM, Chuck Guzis wrote:
Sure. Do
you see a lot of new development in C going on on those
machines lately?
No, but I suspect a resurgence might occur in some of the old ideas.
One such is that as word length increases beyond a certain limit
(say, 64 bits), lareg *integers* are less important, particularly if
they exceed the width of an address.
In that case, it makes sense to treat integers as a special case of
floating point. Thus, in a 64-bit machine, an integer may have a
range of only +/-2^47-1 (48 bits); a short, only 24 bits; a long 96
bits.
It was thus on machines as late as the ETA-10 (I don't recall if Cray
ever adopted that convention) and I wouldn't be surprised to find a
modern system that operated that way.
And one of these days, I expect to see a variable-word length CPU
again. Variable-length BCD arithmetic might be considered a boon by
the financial people.
That would be fantastic. And if my embedded (typically industrial
control and communications) code is ever ported to any of those, I'll be
doing some editing!
-Dave
--
Dave McGuire, AK4HZ
New Kensington, PA