I recently came upon a paper that details an architecture with
hardware based array bounds checking. Did the Symbolics' machines
support something like that? Also, what kind of gains are to be
expected if array bounds checking can be done by hardware?
The paper is titled:
Run-time checking in Lisp by integrating memory addressing and range
checking
The url for the paper is:
http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=74958
In article <····························@posting.google.com>,
······@gmail.com (Usman Latif) wrote:
> I recently came upon a paper that details an architecture with
> hardware based array bounds checking. Did the Symbolics' machines
> support something like that? Also, what kind of gains are to be
> expected if array bounds checking can be done by hardware?
Yes, Lisp Machines did array bounds checking in hardware. The gain is
that there's no performance incentive to turn off automatic bounds
checking (and other than performance, I can't think of any other reason
you would do so).
--
Barry Margolin, ······@alum.mit.edu
Arlington, MA
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