Remember Intel's Itanium? It was sold based on the concept and hardware capabilities, and there was an assumption that a "Sufficiently Smart Compiler" [1] woul

Remember Intel's Itanium? It was sold based on the concept and hardware capabilities, and there was an assumption that a "Sufficiently Smart Compiler" [1] would just fall into place. Knuth mentioned it later as "the Itanium approach that was supposed to be so terrific—until it turned out that the wished-for compilers were basically impossible to write." [2] This is quite similar when you put it the way you did: the hardware exists, it is intentionally stripped down to provide the theoretical minimum required to produce the results people want, and we hope that software people will figure out the rest. [1] http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?SufficientlySmartCompiler http://c2.com/cgi/wiki?SufficientlySmartCompiler [2] http://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=1193856 http://www.informit.com/articles/article.aspx?p=1193856