Allocation of PASM registers (in PASM mode)

[Will Coleda]

On Tue, Jan 13, 2009 at 3:09 PM, Allison Randal <allison at parrot.org> wrote:
> Geoffrey Broadwell wrote:
>>
>> If PASM really is a direct human-compatible
>> representation of bytecode, then we must always maintain the two key
>> identities:
>>
>>  * PBC           == compile(dump(PBC))
>>  * compile(PASM) == compile(dump(compile(PASM)))
>
> A lot depends on who the target audience is for PASM. If it's primarily a
> debugging tool, then literal registers are important. Also, if PASM is
> primarily generated or dumped from bytecode, then it will usually already
> have a sane register allocation algorithm run on it somewhere before the
> actual PASM is produced.
>
> Do we anticipate anyone writing PASM by hand, aside from test scripts or
> small experiments? PIR is the language we generally recommend for
> substantial low-level development.
>
> Allison

I anticipate PASM to be primarily useful for teaching and debugging,
and we should be pointing people at PIR, IMO.

-- 
Will "Coke" Coleda