pyramid architectural restraints

[Kenneth A. Reek]

Regarding the question of whether to invest 10 man-years to rewrite a large
system to make it run on machines that require boundary alignment of data or
to just ignore those machines...

	Ignore those machines and maybe they'll go away.  Architectures that
require aligning multi-byte quantities on particular boundaries sound to me
like they were designed by an engineer who was interested in simplifying his
own task at the expense of the software designers who will use the machine.
The computer is designed once, but there are an infinite number of programs
that might be run on it.  This short-sighted engineering was OK for the early
360's, but is not appropriate for modern computers, and if we software types
tolerate it, it is likely to keep happening.

	Ergo: don't buy any of these machines, and maybe people will stop
making them.

	Ken Reek, Rochester Institute of Technology
	{allegra,seismo}!rochester!ritcv!kar

PS:  Allowing non-aligned data to be accessed with a performance penalty is
only a little less short-sighted.  When designing a computer, anything that
makes the job of writing software easier will be justified in the marketplace,
especially the oem marketplace.  Given the current comparison of hardware
costs to software (i.e. people) costs, a more expensive cpu that is easier
to program will be vastly cheaper in the long run.