Re: The joy of FORTRAN

On Wed, 26 Feb 2025 03:12:11 -0700, Louis Krupp wrote:

Branch delay slots took whatever fun there was out of RISC assembly
language.

They didn’t last long. There was this brief window during about the latter
1980s when they were thought to be a good idea ... just long enough for a
few RISC architectures (SPARC, MIPS, I think also PA-RISC) to be saddled
with them.

By 1990 or so, hardware design had progressed to the point where they were
no longer considered necessary. So POWER and Alpha were able to do without
them, without sacrificing performance.

Though they did survive for a few years longer in special-purpose DSP
architectures.