A few comments on the archives

[Matthew Tuck]

"Peter A. Friend" wrote:

> I saw a LOT of discussion about outputting bytecodes for the JVM. This
> may be handy in the early stages, but there are a lot of things about
> the JVM that give me a headache. For one, there are NO unsigned integer
> types. This may not sound like a big deal, until you try to start
> dealing with things like an IPv4 address in an efficient manner. You
> either have to use a long (64 bits, and takes up two slots on the JVM
> stack) or you have to do some serious shifting and twiddling nonsense.
> Plus, most hardware supports far more operations than the JVM does.
> I'll have to check what they all are, but I think circular rotate is
> one of one. That also may not sound like a big deal either, until you
> try to write an MD5 library with it.

Well we're certainly concerned with that a platform might not support
all the desired operations.  But even if it has to be done kludgily, it
can be done.  Anything like this would be hidden in the Ultra -> JVM
translator, and if you wanted to write a library you'd do in in Ultra
where you wouldn't see this detail.  So it may not be marvellously
efficient, but the first concern is to get something working.
 
> I have to go back and reread the IDE stuff, but I think that making
> everything GUI is a bad idea. If it is provided it should be an option.
> GUI only slows me down.

What do you mean by this statement?  Graphical rather than
character-based?  Windowed rather than command-line?  Editor or
compilation control via command line?

One of the major aims of the IDE stuff up until now is to make things
faster.

-- 
     Matthew Tuck - Software Developer & All-Round Nice Guy
             mailto:matty@box.net.au (ICQ #8125618)
       Check out the Ultra programming language project!
              http://www.box.net.au/~matty/ultra/