William "Chops" Westfield wrote:

>> If I had meant intrinsics, I'd havewritten about intrinsics.
> 
>> I said that if a library is a /standard/ library (and I have  
>> mentioned this word "standard" a few times; you didn't seem to pick  
>> up on this),
> 
> What exactly do you see as the difference between an "intrinsic"  
> function and a Standard library function?  I mean sin() is a standard  
> library function in C, but an intrinsic function in fortran/pascal/ 
> etc, right?

My point in this whole thing is exactly that there isn't a big
difference, and I'm trying to get to the bottom of what Sergio thinks is
the difference.

So this would be a question for Sergio :)

> Are you saying that a C compiler could understand that "sin()" is
> standard and generate straight math processor instructions (intel FP
> has had a FSIN instruction since forever) rather than a library call?
> (assuming that it "knows" that the instructions and the library are
> supposed to generate the same results...)

Sergio's example a while ago was that since the compiler knows what
remove(), insert() and replace() do (because they are part of the
language rather than a library), it is possible for the compiler to
replace a sequence of remove() and insert() with an appropriate
replace(), making the code more efficient.

My counter-argument was that if remove(), insert() and replace() are
/standard/ functions, the compiler doesn't have to actually implement
them to know that it can replace a remove() call followed by an insert()
call with a replace() call -- they may just as well be in a (standard!)
library.

(All obviously used in a way that this is actually correct and makes
sens. We're not talking about compiler mistakes or library bugs or
unusable definitions... :)

Gerhard
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