Re: pascal system

["mdj" <mdj.mdj@gmail.com>]

Michael J. Mahon wrote:

> You must also consider the many cases when the representation of
> a data type is fixed by some external constraint.  Examples would
> be standard file formats or standard IEEE 754 floating point.
>
> Not only is there no good reason to prevent a program from seeing
> and operating on these formats directly as bitfields if necessary,
> but significant performance gains can come from doing so.

For sure, and also no good reason that languages can't be defined that
allow these operations to be portable. It's pretty simple to hide the
potential machine specifics with careful language definition.

> As a trivial example, a square root function can benefit greatly
> from being able to do integer and bitwise operations on the
> exponent and mantissa of its argument.

Yeah, although one would hope this doesn't get done by hand anymore :-)