swap(x,y)
Tom Neff
tneff at bfmny0.UU.NET
Thu Sep 21 01:15:35 AEST 1989
In article <714 at philmtl.philips.ca> ray at philmtl.philips.ca (Raymond Dunn) writes:
>This sounds dangerously like the arguments made by Herman Rubin that 'C'
>should provide facilities to access all the functionality of the machine
>architecture in some direct way.
>
>Since when was that the goal of *any* language other than assemblers?
Examples do exist. PL/M-86 and BLISS come to mind. Every so often
someone at a big computer company decides that assembler is too
dangerous for systems programmers to use (I don't necessarily disagree)
and comes up with a higher level language that has to-the-metal
facilities built in.
These are seldom portable however! To the extent that C strives for
portability such things shouldn't be built in.
However I would enjoy using specific implementations that offered
optional bare-machine extensions for systems and driver work. The
"#pragma builtin" approach is usually good enough.
--
'We have luck only with women -- \\\ Tom Neff
not spacecraft!' *-((O tneff at bfmny0.UU.NET
-- R. Kremnev, builder of FOBOS \\\ uunet!bfmny0!tneff (UUCP)
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