Re: Revised Motion 26 decoration scheme
On 2011-07-19 06:25:01 +0100, John Pryce wrote:
> On 6 Jul 2011, at 01:09, Ian McIntosh wrote:
> > An analogy may help. Picture a 16 car long subway station platform...
>
> It persuaded me we should get used to the idea that decorating a
> 16-byte interval should make it 32 bytes wide, not 17, until
> architectures change drastically. I recall years ago we got used to
> the fact that Fortran typically stored a Boolean in a 32-bit word,
> which really offended my cheeseparing mathematical mind...
32 bytes only when *explicitly* stored into memory. Otherwise
optimizing compilers or interpreters could keep intermediate
results in registers or use a more efficient way for temporary
storage.
In a language without pointers or other ways to retrieve the
encoding in the memory, storage could also be done efficiently.
Otherwise the encoding matters mostly for I/O and data shared
between applications. But if most of the time is taken by raw
computations, decorations won't probably have much influence
on the performances due to this storage problem.
--
Vincent Lefèvre <vincent@xxxxxxxxxx> - Web: <http://www.vinc17.net/>
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Work: CR INRIA - computer arithmetic / Arénaire project (LIP, ENS-Lyon)