Re: Thou shalt have no other gods before the ANSI C standard

From: Chris Adams (cmadams_at_hiwaay.net)
Date: 02/13/05 

Date: Sun, 13 Feb 2005 16:27:10 -0000

Once upon a time, D. J. Bernstein <djb@cr.yp.to> said:
>Chris Adams wrote:
>> I have an Alpha running Tru64 in my cube _right now_
>
>Great! Give me an account so I can do some testing.

I can't on the system in my cube (it's behind a firewall), and normally
we sell accounts on our Alpha servers (I work for an ISP). However, HP
will let you on their Alphas for free:

http://www.testdrive.hp.com/systems/alpha.shtml

They've offered the Test Drive accounts on Alphas running Tru64 and
OpenVMS for years (although it has now expanded to include Alpha,
PA-RISC, and Itanium and FreeBSD, HP-UX, Linux, OpenVMS, and Tru64).

>Maybe I'll even add
>tuned asm for that system. Does the Alpha's cycle counter still wrap
>around at 32 bits?

I don't know - I haven't written Alpha assembly.

>No. Programmers for four decades have been crashing into the largest
>32-bit counter value. Nobody has been crashing into the largest 64-bit
>counter value. It takes a _really_ long time to count up to 2^64. Yes,
>some of us perform computations using larger numbers, but we aren't
>happy with a 128-bit limit either.

What does that have to do with switching to 64 bit ints? It is
reasonable to expect the int type to represent the architecture's basic
preferred word size; long should be the largest sized unit that can be
read and written atomically. Why should the 64 bit systems be crippled
to doing most of their work on 32 bit quantities (when so many things
require larger words)? 

-- 
Chris Adams <cmadams@hiwaay.net>
Systems and Network Administrator - HiWAAY Internet Services
I don't speak for anybody but myself - that's enough trouble.

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