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From: shebs@utah-cs.UUCP (Stanley Shebs)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.misc
Subject: Re: Assembly vs HLL debate
Message-ID: <4124@utah-cs.UUCP>
Date: Mon, 29-Dec-86 00:10:51 EST
Article-I.D.: utah-cs.4124
Posted: Mon Dec 29 00:10:51 1986
Date-Received: Mon, 29-Dec-86 02:41:41 EST
References: <1250@navajo.STANFORD.EDU>
Reply-To: shebs@utah-cs.UUCP (Stanley Shebs)
Organization: PASS Research Group
Lines: 33
Keywords: Hah!

In article <1250@navajo.STANFORD.EDU> billw@navajo.STANFORD.EDU (William E. Westfield) writes:

>Another response (to my explantion of how a PUSH function written
>in Pascal might work), was essentially "dont use pascal, use a
>language where the stack can be directly manipulated by source
>statements" (I think LisP was suggested).  Get serious.  This is
>a HLL vs ASM debate, not a Lisp vs Pascal debate.  Very few HLLs
>allow direct manipulation of the stack.

As the author of the mentioned response, let me say that you missed the
point (and misquoted me - but that's ok, because I wasn't saying things
quite right anyway!).  I was thinking more of particular language
implementations rather than the languages themselves.  Specifically,
Portable Standard Lisp *does* allow you to manipulate the stack
directly, along with many other low-level things.  The compiler has
some capability for on-the-fly augmentation as well, so you can add
new transformation and code generation patterns.  Unfortunately, there
are dozens of caveats associated with this kind of hackery, so it's
only used in our Lisp's internals  (PSL is all written in PSL, including
heap and stack manipulations).  Part of our current research involves
making those capabilities available to the ordinary programmer.
I suppose it could all be done in Pascal, but the language needs more
augmentation (with kinds of declarations etc) than Pascalers would probably
approve.  Lisps are not quite so hamstrung in that respect.

Of course compilers like I'm describing are not available off-the-shelf,
but if all the assembly-language hackers were to redirect their energies
towards writing compilers instead of still more assembly programs, we
would have really great compilers in a year or two...

>BillW

							stan shebs