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Have we lost sight of the fact that when we talk about a programming language we're really talking about how to put bits on CPU registers?
by ryanmarsh 11y ago
Have we lost sight of the fact that when we talk about a programming language we're really talking about how to put bits on CPU registers?
- kd0amg 11y agoWe aren't. Most programming languages do not expose CPU registers to the programmer (because they are not semantically important), and most programmers do not think in terms of moving bits in and out of registers (and typically don't have much to gain from doing so). CPU registers are just an accident of implementation. Programming as a general activity is not inherently tied to a register-based CPU. In fact, programmers are often happy to have compilers/machines remove some put-bits-into-register activities.