Yes, you answered the questions I asked, and gave the answers I suspected. I think part of the point with Direct Threading is that you need to explicitly tell gcc to enable it when compiling the VM, and write some switch statements in a certain way. Haven't got my head around the code yet. It makes quite heavy use of Macros and not many comments.
2008/6/6 Alexander Burger <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>: > Hi Konrad, > >> 1) Does the Interpretor do any kind of tail call optimisation, I > > No, not at all. > > As far as I can see, this is not easy to implement in an efficient way. > The interpreter would have to detect tail recursion at runtime, which > takes much more than time than simply executing the call/return. Each > function must inspect itself, just to find those (extremely few) cases > of tail recursion. > > Above that, it would violate some basic principles of picoLisp. Trying > to be clever behind the scenes, doing things the programmer did not > explicitly specify, losing simplicity and what-you-see-is-what-you-get. > > Tail recursion is nothing more than a simple loop. So we might better > write directly what we mean, using 'while', 'for', 'loop' etc. > > >> 2) With the release of SquirlFish there a lot of discussion about > > You mean SquirrelFish? Actually, I've never heard about it before... > >> Direct threading and register based VM's is any of that potentially >> relevent to Pico Lisp. > > In that sense, picoLisp is also a threaded interpreter. Probably much > faster than a bytecode interpreter, though, as the elements in a thread > perform more high-level operations (e.g. complete list manipulations) > than simple byte codes (which typically do more basic operations). > > Did I get your question right? > > Cheers, > - Alex > -- > UNSUBSCRIBE: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED] > -- UNSUBSCRIBE: mailto:[EMAIL PROTECTED]
