Hi,
On 8/3/10, Frank Heckenbach ih8mj@fjf.gnu.de wrote:
coded in assembler.
Disagree. Instead improve inline routine support.
Inline routines, written in Pascal(!), would generally produce better code than hand-written assembler, because the optimizer can act on them.
GPC has never (that I know of) been meant to be x86-only, so assembly is shunned. (And I like assembly!) Not to bring this up too many times, but the only loss here now is due to bigger size, which ideally would be handled by the linker. Or maybe there really should be an "x86 task force" for GPC to whip up some smaller / faster bits since it really is a popular architecture these days. However, speed optimizations are hard, so my personal interest would just be to shrink it.
EDIT: Pure assembly is harder to maintain, ask Virtual Pascal!
Extended has remained the highest precision f.p. type in Borland Pascal and probably all other Pascals for 15-20 years, while computer speed and memory have improved by orders of magnitude.
But hardware architecture hasn't. The 4, 8 and 10 byte floats are still the only ones supported directly in hardware on the x86. (For other CPUs that may have a 16 byte float, GCC and therefore GPC probably supports it -- can't check right now.)
FPU, MMX, 3dnow!, SSE, AVX ... which to support? I think most people would (probably incorrectly) say that FPU/MMX is deprecated. Gah, I hate modern computing sometimes, always complicating things, never making it easier.
It is also time for more accurate integers. Borland introduced Int64 10-20 years ago, and it has remained the standard highest accuracy integer type.
So you want similar to "long long long int"?? Actually, GPC by default makes "longint" 64-bit! Which in rare cases can be confusing. ;-)
FORTRAN and even BASIC have had exponentiation forever.
So has Extended Pascal.
You can emulate it with ISO 7185, something like (I think) this: exp(ln(a)*b)
Any modern Pascal should use unicode, with all character and string procedures modified accordingly. This is a big advance Delphi started a year or so ago
Took them long enough! (Didn't Plan 9 invent it in 1993?) No, seriously, do your apps really need it? I find it often overhyped as the great fix, but it's hard, and most people really don't use it. It's just more complications. Not that I hate it or anything, but ....