Re: Target-specific Front-Ends? (Was: front end changes for altivec)

["Joseph S. Myers" <jsm28@cam.ac.uk>]

On Tue, 27 Nov 2001, Stan Shebs wrote:

> > Why would we want to put into our compiler a TARGET-SPECIFIC syntactic
> > extension to handle the rather generic concept of a fixed-size vector?
> >  And why
> > would we want to add a configure mechanism to do that?
> > 
> > Let me answer for you:  We don't.
> 
> Who's this "we" you're referring to?  It can't be the body of GCC
> contributors, because Zem is in that group, and it's not the

Perhaps it's the Mission Statement which says

          + Patches will be considered equally based on their technical
            merits.

along with the accepted notion of technical merits that
machine-independent files shouldn't contain target-specific code, only
feature-specific code (see portability.texi and codingconventions.html).
The technical merits of a patch include those of the design of any feature
it implements and it's perfectly reasonable to object to badly designed
proposed features before there's an explicit patch.  It should be clear
that a good design would provide interfaces that allow for the variety of
vector types on different processors and don't do violence to the existing
C syntax or semantics.

-- 
Joseph S. Myers
jsm28@cam.ac.uk