ow Integers Should Work

[Don]

On 06.12.2011 05:21, bcs wrote:
> On 12/05/2011 08:37 AM, Don wrote:
>> On 05.12.2011 14:31, bearophile wrote:
>>> Found through Reddit, two blog posts about how integers should behave
>>> in system languages (with hardware support):
>>>
>>> http://blog.regehr.org/archives/641
>>> http://blog.regehr.org/archives/642
>>>
>>> Bye,
>>> bearophile
>>
>> Not very convincing, since he proposes a change to existing
>> architectures, and seems completely unaware of the overflow flag.
>
> I think he's looking at it form the language theory standpoint. As such,
> architectures has nothing to do with it (the architectures to be
> targeted has yet to be defined at that point)and getting access to the
> overflow flag would require exposing it natively in the language.

It's not that he hasn't specified an architecture. It's a proposal which 
does not work on _any_ existing architectures!
It's pure fantasy.

And he talks about NaN, when he means infinity. Floating point overflow 
never results in a NaN. He doesn't seem to know anything about 
saturating integer arithmetic, which exists in hardware (even x86 
machines have supported a couple of operations since 1996).

Useless.