>Date: Thu, 15 Apr 1999 16:08:56 +0200
>From: "Steinar H. Gunderson" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
>Subject: Mersenne: Re: preventive measures
>
[snip]
>
>You have an entirely wrong picture of what assembly is. Assembly is the
>most high level programming language existing. It is _not_ a portable
language
>like C, where the C compiler actually _converts_ (compiles) the C code into
>assembly code for the machine that is to run the program, optimizes it
>and finally runs it through an assembler and linker to create the full
program.
>
Are you sure about this? maybe you meant to write - Assembly is in fact
the *lowest* possible level of programming. You are quite correct though
about it being non-portable. It is processor specific.
And that is precisely why it *is* possible to have a compiler do the following
1. produce code that has processor specific opcodes
2. produce code that is optimised for different processor architectures
- both in terms of execution & pipelining units, taking advantage of out
of order & speculative execution etc.
3. produce code that can approach the best hand-tuned assembly code
>In other words, the phrase `recompiling the assembly in a compiler that is
>PIII/K63 aware' is totally meaningless. There will soon be PIII aware
>assemblers (for some reason, I belive gas will be one of the first... How
>strange.), but all they will do is enable the user to use the new opcodes (as
>well as the more `standard' opcodes, some of which have been around since the
>8086 (good old days... I had an 8088)).
Hold on a minute you contradict yourself here, now is it possible or isn't it?
>Regardless of which assembler you use,
>the code will stay at the exact same speed, as opposed to C compilers, where
>it in fact can make a big difference.
Perhaps someone who has access to multiple compilers can prove or disprove
this. I know many years ago that the Watcom compilers always used to come
out pretty good. Mu gut instinct tells me that this is probably still the
case.
Gordon Spence, Nokia IP Telephony
Applications Engineer Grove House, Waltham Way,
[EMAIL PROTECTED] White Waltham, Maidenhead,
http://www.nokiaiptel.com/ Berkshire, SL6 3TN, UK.
________________________________________________________________
Unsubscribe & list info -- http://www.scruz.net/~luke/signup.htm
