>many older folk...like using bits in a byte, or a byte as an ID field. Or quibbling over the length of a Name field. All those habits proved to be bad in the l

>many older folk...like using bits in a byte, or a byte as an ID field. Or quibbling over the length of a Name field. All those habits proved to be bad in the long run. I'll bet you the people inventing these modern new architectures are among the more experienced engineers at the companies who I would criticize by saying, we used to think it was a good idea to code around the limitations of old architectures and now we're accused of coding for PDP-11s and processors aren't PDP-11s any more. so what we should do now I'm told is code very specifically around the idiosyncracies of the new PDP-11,000's and that is what marks progress. Caches were invented to invisibly and silently make things faster, and that was a brilliant idea. Now new cache designers analyze what we used to do to insist we change how we code so they can cache what they want to cache not what we want to do, and all younger programmers talk about these days is coding for the cache (which itself is a cache of a cache of a cache). this is not progress, it's coding for the timing of the modern storage drum.