Self-modifying code

[David Collier-Brown]

>From article <33441 at yale-celray.yale.UUCP>, by lisper-bjorn at CS.YALE.EDU (Bjorn Lisper):
> In article <12357 at ut-sally.UUCP> nather at ut-sally.UUCP (Ed Nather) writes:
>>In article <5254 at june.cs.washington.edu>, pardo at june.cs.washington.edu
> (David Keppel) writes:

[a long, and generally well-reasoned debate elided]

>>Sorry, no.  I've heard LOTS of arguments against programs that generate their
>>own code, 

  Gentles, could we ***PLEASE*** reserve the term "self-modifying code" for
code which actually modifies itself on the fly (eg, for generating
indexes by instruction modification instead of using index registers)?

  Much of what is being discussed here is part of the well-known and
respectable "generate and execute" paradigm. The only difference
between this and the normal code-generation paradigm is that an
application generates code at run-time, not a compiler at a previous
time.

  Mixing the two is making this discussion "noisy".

--dave (sorry about the pedantry, but its important) c-b
-- 
 David Collier-Brown.  {mnetor yunexus utgpu}!geac!daveb
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