Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!bloom-beacon!mit-eddie!ll-xn!ames!vsi1!altnet!uunet!mcvax!cernvax!hjm 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