Bit Addressable Architectures

[Frank Adams]

In article <7452 at brl-smoke.ARPA> gwyn at brl.arpa (Doug Gwyn (VLD/VMB) <gwyn>) writes:
>It's occasionally been tried, and there is nothing fundamentally wrong with
>the idea.  The biggest reason for lack of popularity is that it doesn't help
>much with the code generated for typical existing high-level langauges; they
>often don't provide convenient access to bit-level data, so applications are
>coded to access data in larger chunks and pick it apart themselves.

Of course, high-level languages which provide convenient access to bit-level
data have been tried occasionally, and haven't been very popular.  The
biggest reason for this is that popular machine architectures don't provide
efficient access to bit-level data, so applications are coded to access data
in larger chunks and pick it apart themselves.
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Frank Adams                           ihnp4!philabs!pwa-b!mmintl!franka
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