At 5:00 PM -0400 8/6/03, Peter J. Wasilko, Esq. wrote:
>The issue I was trying to get at in this thread was: "What hardware
>architecture would provided the best / easiest / most elegant/ most
>secure support for implementing a language that would include first
>class continuations as part of its specification?"
>
>Also, for sake of this discussion, it can be assumed that the language
>in question and its OS would be fused together to provide a unified
>environment running on bare hardware.
In that case... the current CPU architecture is about as good as
you're going to get. What'd help more would be semi-privileged access
to the system MMU and a bit of an overhaul to the meta-memory system
in general. A faster double-dereferencing mode would probably be
reasonably useful too.
It's hard to say--since there's a level beyond which I really can't
go now, I'm not sure what would be missing if I could go past it.
Some of the old hands at this are probably better off discussing it,
though I'm not sure any of the experimental and small-run hardware
really got exploited to the point where you could draw reasonable
conclusions about what could be improved.
--
Dan
--------------------------------------"it's like this"-------------------
Dan Sugalski even samurai
dan@sidhe.org have teddy bears and even
teddy bears get drunk