On Mon, Sep 03, 2001 at 06:33:19PM -0400, Ken Fox wrote:
> Thanks for the info. If you guys maintain this level of documentation
> as the code develops, Perl 6 will be easy for first-timers to work on.
That's exactly the idea. :)
> > To be more specific about the software CPU, it will contain a large
> > number of registers.
>
> The register frames store values, not pointers to values?
Values. Except in the case of PMC's, of course, where there will be a
pointer into the heap.
> This seems to limit the implementation possibilities a lot. Won't a
> TIL use direct goto's instead of returning the next op address?
No. There'll be goto ops as well.
> I'd like to see a description of *just* the opcode stream and have a
> second section describe the protocol for implementing the ops.
Wait for opcodes.pod, which should be with you by the end of the week.
I have thought of this.
> Won't we have separate implementations of the opcode interpreter
> that are optimized for certain machines? (I'd at least like to see
> that possibility!)
Yes.
> Damian's proposals for multi-methods have got me thinking there
> should be one very fast implementation of multi-method dispatching
> used at the opcode level.
Method despatch opcodes are a can of worms. Don't go there.
Simon
