At 11:29 AM 10/4/2001 -0400, Bryan C. Warnock wrote: >Just the fact that we needed this patch in the first place indicates that >we're not doing *nearly* enough talking beforehand of some of the >particulars of Dan's overall design.
That's the thing, though--we *don't* need this patch, not for integer constants. It's actually detrimental to performance in many ways. Parrot guarantees you can embed 32-bit signed integer constants in the instruction stream, and that's it. These constants are used to load up integer registers, sure, but they're also used for jump offsets. Integer *variable* constants should go in the constant table. We don't have any of those yet, though. They come in with the PMC stuff. Which isn't to say the design shouldn't be worked over and talked about. It should, and it should get re-evaluated as we go along. (And all the code I write should probably ultimately be replaced with code that actually works... :) Dan --------------------------------------"it's like this"------------------- Dan Sugalski even samurai [EMAIL PROTECTED] have teddy bears and even teddy bears get drunk