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From: hjm@cernvax.UUCP (Hubert Matthews)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.forth
Subject: Hardware type checking
Message-ID: <829@cernvax.UUCP>
Date: 19 Sep 88 07:40:23 GMT
Reply-To: hjm@cernvax.UUCP (Hubert Matthews)
Distribution: comp.lang.forth
Organization: CERN European Laboratory for Particle Physics, CH-1211 Geneva, Switzerland
Lines: 10


Some LISP machines (all?) have hardware tags for run-time type-checking of
operands.  Could such technology be applied to FORTH, so that a floating-point
addition could detect in hardware, in parallel with the computation, whether
its operands were of type floating?  Has any tried this?  Is it at all an
interesting idea?  Could it be added to the Novix/Harris chips without 
a complete rework?  How would a type mismatch be handled, given that real-time
and control process programmers won't accept a core-dump as an error message?

	Hubert Matthews