Re: Hardware Design supporting Ada

[Niklas Holsti <niklas.holsti@tidorum.invalid>]

On 16-12-11 22:55 , Shark8 wrote:
> In the Ada IR thread an interesting sub-discussion regarding
> specialized hardware came up; some of the HW mentioned were:
> * The Rational R-1000
   ...
> * The Intel iAPX 432
    ...
> * The Rekursiv

Did they mention the Nokia MPS-10:

http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=989799&dl=ACM&coll=DL&CFID=874929794&CFTOKEN=55213355

http://computer-programming-forum.com/44-ada/596b4e2f57763ce6.htm

> In addition to this, I've been doing some work looking into
> balanced-ternary computers ...
 > Further, [balanced] ternary provides some interesting properties;
 > if,for example, we define {1, 0, -1} as {greater-than, equal,
 > less-than} respectively then we can have a JUMP instruction
 > that takes this single Trit comparison result and three offsets
 > and take care of ALL the JUMP combinations in binary instruction
 > -sets with one instruction.

Then you will be able to implement the original FORTRAN "arithmetic 
IF-statement" very efficiently, it being of the form

    IF (expr) 100, 200, 300

which would pass control to the label 100 if the expression in the 
parenthesis is negative, to 200 if it is zero, and to 300 if it is positive.

However, I don't see how such an instruction would help Ada, in particular.

-- 
Niklas Holsti
Tidorum Ltd
niklas holsti tidorum fi
       .      @       .