At 01:52 PM 25/04/2001 -0400, Dan Sugalski wrote:
>Seriously, I don't see why this should be a scary thing. So, the opcode
>table's extendable. So what? It'll make language X mode simpler, for some
>value of X, if that language can load in its own set of extended opcodes.
>Perhaps someone'll want to do functional programming with the Parrot
>runtime, and it makes the most sense from a speed and parser simplicity
>standpoint to treat certain activities as atomic things and emit a single
>bytecode for them. Extending the opcode table makes sense there.
I agree, although I would argue that for functional programming you don't
need anything but Perl:
http://perl.plover.com/lambda/ (by MJD).
Anyway, I would say opcode extendability should be analysed with a ROI
optics, because I really don't know if having new opcodes (instead of
faking them with subs -- if we have appropriate ways of locking &
synchronizing thread data) would be really necessary.
- Branden
