At 6:54 PM -0800 2/22/03, Tupshin Harper wrote:
Sorry for all the questions...these are the trials and tribulations of dealing with a newbie trying to get up to speed with the current state of parrot. So here's another question:
Is it possible and/or meaningful to read and write from a part of a register(e.g. a single word) in pasm?
At the moment no, and they'd only really be useful for the integer registers. Having said that, which ones would you want? I don't mind us thinking about an intreg.ops set.
I actually *don't* necessarily want to. The question only came up becasue virtually all real CPUs allow you to do this to conserve registers, and I'm just trying to understand how and why a VM like parrot diverges from the concepts/semantics of a real CPU. If this kind of optimization is to take place, it sems like it would have to take place on the fly (JIT level) once the system knew what kind of target CPU it was running on, and that it wouldn't be meaningful to do so at the pasm or pbc generation levels(except possibly as a hinting mechanism). Does this make sense, or am I smoking crack?
-Tupshin
