Self-modifying code

[Peter J Desnoyers]

In article <60782 at sun.uucp> guy at gorodish.Sun.COM (Guy Harris) writes:
>
>A naive (and not rhetorical) question: what evidence is there to indicate the
>degree to which "narrowing the semantic gap" with capability machines and the
>like would improve the productivity of programmers or the reliability of
>programs, and to which other techniques [fast machines, good software]
>achieve the same goal?

Some protection and tracing features are MUCH slower in software.
These features are also useful in writing wonderful debuggers. You
need a bus snooper or ICE with an 8088 to achieve debugger features
that can be done in software on the 68020 or 80386. And per-task
memory protection is a big win in any environment, but impossible in
software. 

				Peter Desnoyers
				peter at athena.mit.edu