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Date:Mon May 22 12:13:57 1995 
Subject:Re: fastest processor for running Poplog? 
From:Julian Clinton 
Volume-ID:950523.01 

>..Dec Alpha (alas I gather only VMS poplog is being
>ported to the Alpha?)

For information, there is a port of Poplog to Alpha OSF/1 which is
being beta tested at the moment. It is a 64-bit implementation which
means that, for example, considerably larger integers can be represented
as simple integers (e.g. on 32-bit implementations, factorial(12) is integer
while factorial(13) is biginteger - on the Alpha/OSF Poplog, the swap
occurs between 19 and 20). Also decimals have greater accuracy. On the
flip side, data structures are larger (e.g. a pair is 24 bytes instead of
12 bytes) so memory requirements will be greater.

People who are migrating code from other platforms (particularly external
code) may find that the code contains assumptions about the size of pointers
which don't hold on a 64-bit machine. There'll be more information about this
in the release notes.

Barring unforseen circumstances, we will be shipping Alpha OSF/1 Poplog
by mid-June.

Julian