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From: greg@vertical.oz (Greg Bond)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: The VAX Always Uses Fewer Instructions
Message-ID: <140@vertical.oz>
Date: 5 Jul 88 01:36:33 GMT
References: <6921@cit-vax.Caltech.Edu> <28200161@urbsdc> <10595@sol.ARPA> <270@laic.UUCP> <20424@beta.lanl.gov> <810@garth.UUCP>
Reply-To: greg@vertical.oz (Greg Bond)
Organization: Vertical Software, Melbourne, Australia
Lines: 15

In article <810@garth.UUCP> smryan@garth.UUCP (Steven Ryan) writes:
>>As you pointed out, there is a need for optimizing assemblers.
>Strong disagreement--an assembler should be safe, simple, and dumb. If you
>want an optimiser, use a compiler.
>What is preferable is separate layer to do the optimisation. The problem with

In fact, use the "optimisation" pass from your favourite C compiler.
This is tough to organise on most Unix boxes, but goes great on the
8086 X-compiler we have here.  The optimiser is a separate assembler-assembler
processor.  I can't see where its orientation as a C optimiser would kill
semantics of assembler code.  But then, it may not be a real clever
optimiser either (for the general case).
-- 
Gregory Bond,  Vertical Software, Melbourne (greg@vertical.oz)
I used to be a pessimist. Now I am a realist.