I wrote:
>>What has Intel's architecture to do with the 360 architecture?
>
>Nothing. I meant to imply that although there have been statements about
>the difficulty of porting POP to Intel 80x86 based systems, POP was
>implemented on the IBM 360, an architecture arguably much more difficult
>to implement POP on.
By "nothing" I meant that there was no direct relationship between Intel
and IBM that caused the 80x86 family to be designed as it was.
As others have pointed out, both architectures have limited segment sizes
(at least prior to the 80386). I also seem to remember there was a problem
with implementing the POP-2 stack on the 360.
POP should really be quite easy to implement on the 80386 and later Intel
processors. On these machines the segments can be as big as the machine's
address space, and the segment register architecture can be used to great
advantage to provide separate address spaces and to simplify relocation of
code.
Has anyone written a compiler in 'C' or 'C++'?
What about a 'POP' machine - has there been any work to build some hardware
assistance. On a PC, there are several things that could be provided on
an option card - memory width expansion for type tags for example.
--
Ray Dunn at home | Beaconsfield, Quebec | Phone: (514) 630 3749
ray@philmtl.philips.ca | ray@cam.org | uunet!sobeco!philmtl!ray
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