bryce at kampjes.demon.co.uk wrote:
> nicolas cellier writes:
>  > I don't even know which hardware supports or not these traps...
>  > I even wonder if such features were mandatory...
>  > That should not stop us: as suggested, Smalltalk is already sufficiently 
>  > slow to afford a sticky flag test at each Float primitive in case no 
>  > hardware trap is available.
> 
> Hopefully Smalltalk will not always be that slow.
> 
> All we'd need to do was remove the boxing and unboxing around
> floating point operations. Inside single statements, that is
> equivalent to the Boolean optimisations that Exupery already
> does. Across statements will require a proper optimiser.

Good support for matrix/vector operations, possibly with an interface to
BLAS, seems like a much better plan.

Paolo