On Sat, Apr 12, 2008 at 08:26:34PM -0700, Bob Rogers wrote:
> The ops in src/ops/stack.ops are holdovers from the bad old days of
> limited registers. In modern times, it is more versatile (and probably
> faster) to create an array and use it as an explicit stack via push and
> pop operations.
I've conducted a review of the codebase to see where stack ops
are being used. For reference, the deprecated stack opcodes are
entrytype, depth, lookback, save, savec, restore, and rotate_up.
(The "saveall" and "restoreall" opcodes are being handled by
another ticket.)
Other than t/op/stacks.t (which will go away when this issue is
resolved), the following files or subsystems seem to use one or
more of the deprecated opcodes:
languages/BASIC
languages/befunge
examples/pasm/stack.pasm
examples/pasm/nanoforth.pasm
examples/pasm/xml_parser.pasm
examples/benchmarks/primes2.pasm
examples/benchmarks/primes2_i.pasm
Here's my vote for the disposition of each of these:
1. languages/BASIC has the save/restore opcodes in it, but it
also seems to have some opcodes such as pushp and popp that
have been gone for over two years.
That said, the various *.bas sample files all seem to compile
and not use any of save/restore/pushp/popp, so I'm thinking
we can leave BASIC alone even after removing the stack ops.
2. languages/befunge uses save/restore in a few macros in its
*.pasm files. It looks like it might be a good candidate
for converting things into PIR functions... but if we want
to leave it as PASM then there will be a fair bit of
macro conversion to be done.
3. examples/pasm/stack.pasm should simply disappear, since we
will no longer have any stack ops to demonstrate. :-)
4. The remaining examples/* files are all in PASM, and somewhat
ancient PASM at that. (I guess all PASM source is pretty old,
though.) Do we really need to keep these examples around--
are they likely to be useful to anyone? If no, I say we should
just get rid of them. If we still need the PASM examples, then
it's probably better to just rewrite these entirely than to
try to fix up what is already there.
Comments welcomed.
Pm
