Gabriel Sechan wrote:
----------------------------------------
Date: Tue, 22 Jan 2008 19:25:32 -0800 From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] To:
[email protected] Subject: Re: Is Scheme/Lisp somehow
more "fundamental" than other languages?
Andrew Lentvorski wrote: [snip]
Gabriel Sechan wrote: Large register stacks take a lot of
chip space, and increase the transistor count elsewhere as
well. When you have limited die space, you can't have
everything. These days cache is more of an issue than
registers, but in the old days the registers were the big
transistor count users. Hence the 6 register intel
architecture.
Just one of the reasons I loathe the intel architecture.
Um, I thought that x86_64 had finally broken out of this? Am I
wrong?
Yes, you are wrong. Gabe is also wrong. The x386 has 8 general
purpose registers, not six [1]. The AMD64 architecture has 16
general purpose registers. See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X86-64
for general info. In addition to the general purpose registers, the
x86/x86-64 family also has numerous special purpose registers which
make programming less onerous. Or maybe more so depending on your
abilities. Few people have to work at that low a level.
eax, ebx, ecx, edx, esi, edi. Maybe you can call ebp a general
purpose register, although its always used as frame. Esp is *not* a
general purpose register, its the stack pointer. Fuck with that at
very high risk. You can stretch it to 7, not 8. Wikipedia is wrong.
And you apparently don't know how to read a a spec sheet. I referenced
the actual technical manual for the AMD386DX microprocessor. It states
directly that those registers are general purpose. It's not their fault
that your software is borked.
Gus
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