Re: New assembly language instructions to support OO languages?

On 4 Dec, 18:09, "Tony" <t...@my.net> wrote:
> To me, it seems like "reducing everything to a function" may be a bit
> dated given that OO languages are the thing nowadays. Can anyone
> imagine any new potential assembly language instructions that would
> make implemention of OO languages easier? (Not just necessarily the
> function thing, but anything).


I don't know about new ones, but how about resurrecting some old ones?
At least two different computers of the 1960's had an 'indirect' bit
at the high end of an address word, meaning that it pointed to another
word containing an address. In its turn, that might have the high bit
set, etcetera. An instruction to load a datum or an address would
follow such a chain of indirections until it reached the
actually-wanted item. I know this was very good for Prolog
implementations.


[Indirect addressing was quite common through the 1970s. The PDP-11
and VAX had it. But I gather that it's a challenge to implement
efficiently, and if the machine has a lot of registers, it doesn't gain
you much. -John]

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