4 ms·
I wasn't there, but building entire systems from zillions of small procedures sounds familiar. Wasn't this a guiding principle behind languages such as SmallTal
by whoopdedo 8y ago
I wasn't there, but building entire systems from zillions of small procedures sounds familiar. Wasn't this a guiding principle behind languages such as SmallTalk and Forth? The first system to be implemented on 8086 was Forth with its structure of loading code from 1K blocks.
But I can see the chicken-and-egg here. Did languages at the time think in terms of small contained blocks of code because the hardware they ran on was limited? Or did CPU engineers restrict their designs to match the segmented demands of the programming languages?
- kabdib 8y agoI've wondered if the 16 byte paragraph size came from prejudices of engineers who were involved with the iAPX 432, an "object oriented" processor that was canceled after Intel realized it had significant, architecture-level performance flaws.