At 10:20 AM 10/2/2001 -0400, Andy Dougherty wrote:
>On Tue, 2 Oct 2001, Dan Sugalski wrote:
>
> > >Also, if someone wants an IV constant bigger than 32 bits
> > >and their IVs are bigger than 32 bits, then we will find ourselves in
> > >need of two set_i_ic variants: immediate and indirect. The IV constants
> > >needing no more than 32 bits use the immediate mode, and the others
> > >use the indirect (to const_table) mode.
> >
> > Yup. I'm not sure I'm going to worry about that all that much, though. I
> > don't know that it'll be a big problem in practice.
>
>Actually, I fear it might be. There's already considerable demand in
>perl5 to have 64-bit IVs, even if implemented as 'long long', particularly
>for various largefile issues.
>
>Perl6 users are likely to want the same ability, so expect users to want
>to have 64-bit IVs.
Oh, they'll be able to have 64 (or 128, or 256) bit IVs. That's fine. It's
just the in-stream integer constants that might be limited to 32 bits for
portability reasons. Probably have to do some sort of odd:
set I0, 0x12345678
lshift I0, 32
add I0, I0, 0x9ABCDEF0
to get 64 bit integers into I registers. For variables, I expect we'll do
something else.
Dan
--------------------------------------"it's like this"-------------------
Dan Sugalski even samurai
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