AFAIK, scatter/gather have been available in supercomputer vector ISA's since the mid-1970'ies. And even with the state of compiler technology back then, the Cr

AFAIK, scatter/gather have been available in supercomputer vector ISA's since the mid-1970'ies. And even with the state of compiler technology back then, the Cray Fortran compiler was able to use scatter/gather to vectorize loops with indirect addressing (e.g. a[ind[i]] ). Such as occurs e.g. in sparse matrix style computations.