Relay-Version: version B 2.10 5/3/83; site utzoo.UUCP Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!ccplumb From: ccplumb@watmath.UUCP Newsgroups: comp.arch Subject: Brain-Clogging Decimal (Was: Re: Wirth's challenge (Was Re: RISC)) Message-ID: <15782@watmath.waterloo.edu> Date: Tue, 8-Dec-87 18:57:49 EST Article-I.D.: watmath.15782 Posted: Tue Dec 8 18:57:49 1987 Date-Received: Sun, 13-Dec-87 05:36:03 EST References: <6901@apple.UUCP> Reply-To: ccplumb@watmath.waterloo.edu (Colin Plumb) Organization: U of Waterloo, Ontario Lines: 35 Confusion: U(Waterloo), Ontario In article <6901@apple.UUCP> baum@apple.UUCP (Allen Baum) writes: >A small addendum: while the 801 may not have played an enormous role, [In the design of the HP precision architecture] >System/370 certainly did! Many of the design decisions in Spectrum were in >reaction to problems we saw (& measured & were told about) in the 370 >architecture, from both IBM and Amdahl. This got me thinking (with apologies for ever uttering anything faintly resembling praise for IBM), that the 360/370/whatever architecture isn't all that bad. (Perhaps you can tell me via mail what the problems are. I'm interested, but it would probably be ancient headgear to others.) With the exception, of course, of all the packed decimal divide stuff. The most recent processor family I know of that still faintly supports BCD math is the 68000. Hooray! It seems people are finally realizing that, while for simple procesing (say, adding up a payroll), the work of binary <-> decimal conversion far exceeds the processing that's done on the binary numbers, it isn't worth jumping through hoops in hardware and software to avoid the translation. The overhead is fixed and won't kill your system. Optimize somewhere else. Surely you can improve the disk buffering algorithm to detect sequential access and do read-ahead and purge-behind. Does anyone else have any ideas about COBO* (I can't bring myself to say "Langauge") support in architectures? Is is just hanging on like bad smells and MS-DOS, or is it worth anything at all? -- -Colin (watmath!ccplumb) (To the tune of "I don't know why she swallowed the fly") I don't know why the process won't die. Perhaps it's a BUG. Verses, anyone?