On Thu, 2007-06-21 at 09:10 -0700, Tracy R Reed wrote: > So for the past year or two I have been reading up on functional > programming. I still haven't written anything useful with it but I hope > that will change soon. Here is an exchange I had with Chris Seberino on > IRC last night which I thought some of you might enjoy. > > <tessier> |seb|_: Have you looked at Stackless python? I just suddenly > realized it's potential. >
This reminds me of the Ti 99 series of CPUs. They were stackless and had a memory-to-memory architecture. They only had three hardware registers - program counter, status register, and workspace pointer. With these chips, a context switch was up to 4 times faster than on the x86 running at the same clock speed. A complete context switch could be performed with a single instruction, and the limiting factor on the number of contexts was the amount of memory available. There was no stack or heap to keep track of and operations involving data in memory were faster than on other systems. It's a shame the CPU never took off like Intel processors did. PGA -- The information contained in this e-mail message is confidential, intended only for the use of the individual or entity named above. If the reader of this e-mail is not the intended recipient, or the employee or agent responsible to deliver it to the intended recipient, you are hereby notified that any review, dissemination, distribution or copying of this communication is strictly prohibited. If you have received this e-mail in error, please contact [EMAIL PROTECTED] Paul G. Allen Software Engineer BSIT/SE Quake Global, Inc. 858-277-7290 x285 -- [email protected] http://www.kernel-panic.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/kplug-lpsg
