Re: documentation blur

[Jean-Pierre Radley <jpr at jpr dot com>]

Neil Booth propounded (on Tue, Feb 27, 2001 at 10:22:53PM +0000):
| Jean-Pierre Radley wrote:-
| 
| >             While picking a specific cpu type will schedule things
| >             appropriately for that particular chip, the compiler will
| >             not generate any code that does not run on the i386 without
| >             the -march=cpu type option being used. i586 is equivalent to
| >             pentium and i686 is equivalent to pentiumpro. k6 is the AMD
| >             chip as opposed to the Intel ones.
| > 
| > The sentence starting "While picking..." contains "not", once again
| > "not", and then "without".  I don't find it all easy to understand.
| > In fact, I'm not sure I can properly parse it at all.
| 
| It's not too bad at all; I assume your native language is French?

My native language is French, but I have lived in the United States
since 12/24/1936, and I do believe my command of English is several
levels beyond adequate; OTOH, my command of French has declined to the
point where I probably could no longer pass the same classic French
baccalaureate examinations that I aced in 1949.

| Anyway, what it's trying to say is that -mcpu configures instruction
| scheduling but still generates i386 code.  To get code with instructions
| that run only on higher processors such as the Pentium, you need to use
| -march.

OK, then why not put it that way?

Whether in French or in English, employing double (not to say triple)
negation usually degrades clarity (though I readily concede that it
unfortunately perfectly conforms to the classic style of Unix man
pages).

-- 
JP