order of discussion

Mike Prince mprince@crl.com
Mon, 12 Dec 1994 12:18:55 -0800 (PST)



On Mon, 12 Dec 1994, Raul Deluth Miller wrote:

> While I have the utmost respect for structured design principles, you
> cannot ignore the physics of the underlying situation if you want to
> have a hope of breaking new ground.  This means visiting issues such
> as word size, mapping of proposed interfaces onto typical and exotic
> hardware, and consideration of common failure modes.
> 
> On the other hand, I think it is perfectly alright to "waste"
> computational facilities.  If machine (A) has some instruction that
> doesn't map well onto the instruction sets of machine (B), (C) or (D),
> we probably don't want it in our common instruction set model.  If we
> can take advantage of such instructions in a particular implementation
> of our communication model/kernel, all well and good.
> 
> That make sense?

It makes perfect sense.

Mike