swap(x,y)

[Tom Neff]

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?

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.

These are seldom portable however!  To the extent that C strives for
portability such things shouldn't be built in.

However I would enjoy using specific implementations that offered
optional bare-machine extensions for systems and driver work.  The
"#pragma builtin" approach is usually good enough.
-- 
'We have luck only with women --    \\\     Tom Neff
          not spacecraft!'         *-((O    tneff at bfmny0.UU.NET
 -- R. Kremnev, builder of FOBOS      \\\   uunet!bfmny0!tneff (UUCP)