swap(x,y)

[Norman Diamond]

In article <714 at philmtl.philips.ca> ray at philmtl.philips.ca (Raymond Dunn) writes:

>>This sounds dangerously like the arguments made by Herman Rubin that 'C'
>>should provide facilities to access all the functionality of the machine
>>architecture in some direct way.
>>Since when was that the goal of *any* language other than assemblers?

Actually, a recent posting pointed out that many of the features that
made it into C and even Fortran *did* come about because of this goal.
Only perhaps the goal was not stated as such.

In article <14706 at bfmny0.UU.NET> tneff at bfmny0.UU.NET (Tom Neff) writes:

>Examples do exist.  PL/M-86 and BLISS come to mind.  Every so often
>someone at a big computer company decides that assembler is too
>dangerous for systems programmers to use (I don't necessarily disagree)
>and comes up with a higher level language that has to-the-metal
>facilities built in.

Well, PL/M wasn't such a good example of this.  Intel's assembler is a
higher-level language than PL/M, and easier to use!

--
-- 
Norman Diamond, Sony Corporation (diamond at ws.sony.junet)
  The above opinions are inherited by your machine's init process (pid 1),
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