Re: Streams in Ada

["Marin David Condic" <marin.condic.auntie.spam@pacemicro.com>]

I suppose that may be what it would be if you thought of the *LARGEST*
addressable unit - but going the other direction is I think what was
intended. AFAIK, Alphas will address a single byte - even if it isn't the
most optimal use of the bus. Whereas, the PDP-10 would only address a 36 bit
word as the smallest element it would extract from memory. The rest of the
operations for smaller sized units would disect the word after it was
fetched.

I doubt we'd have to consider various possible hardware schemes as part of
the issue. Only the instruction set.

MDC
--
Marin David Condic
Senior Software Engineer
Pace Micro Technology Americas    www.pacemicro.com
Enabling the digital revolution
e-Mail:    marin.condic@pacemicro.com
Web:      http://www.mcondic.com/

"Florian Weimer" <fw@deneb.enyo.de> wrote in message
news:87g0fqpa4b.fsf@deneb.enyo.de...
> "Marin David Condic" <marin.condic.auntie.spam@pacemicro.com> writes:
>
> > As I understand the notion of Storage_Element, they rather intended for
this
> > to correspond to whatever the hardware would normally reference with a
> > machine address and pull off the bus.
>
> According to this definition, Storage_Element'Size would have to be
> 256. :-/
>
> > The fact that there may be instructions that let you pick apart that
> > chunk of stuff you pulled from the bus wouldn't be a consideration
> > because you'd be looking for the machine's most efficient means of
> > referencing data. Hence, even though the PDP-10 could easily disect
> > the 36 bit words, you'd still want Storage_Element to be 36 bits
> > because that was the smallest chunk of data you could extract from
> > main memory.
>
> This would imply that Storage_Element'Size should equal 64 with
> generic Alpha targets.  I don't think many vendors implement this.