At 03:01 PM 9/14/2001 -0700, Damien Neil wrote:
>On Fri, Sep 14, 2001 at 04:42:21PM -0400, Dan Sugalski wrote:
> > Where all word values are as big as the word size says they are.
>
>What should the byteloader do when it encounters data in a word that
>cannot fit in a native word?
That, generally speaking, shouldn't happen. We're restricting integers and
integerish things to 32 bits, but that doesn't mean that the on-disk format
needs to be 32 bits. So if a Cray builds bytecode files, those files will
be filled with 8 byte integers restricted to the range that a 32-bit
integer can manage. A problem? No, not really. What we're basically saying
is that all our integers are 32 bits. What we're *not* saying is how many
bytes each 32 bit integer takes, nor its endianness. :)
Don't forget we already have the necessity to preprocess in some cases,
since we have both big and little endian machines in our stable of
supported systems.
What we're doing is making sure the common case, the bytecode on disk being
used by the platform that owns the drive, is as fast as possible. We're
also making sure that we don't make it so you can't trade bytecode files
around, nor that you can't mount the same filesystem with perl utility code
on your Solaris, HP-UX, Tru64, and x86 Linux systems simultaneously.
Dan
--------------------------------------"it's like this"-------------------
Dan Sugalski even samurai
[EMAIL PROTECTED] have teddy bears and even
teddy bears get drunk
