Re: Question on aggregates and GIMPLE

[Richard Henderson <rth at redhat dot com>]

On Tue, Jun 08, 2004 at 09:38:49PM -0400, Richard Kenner wrote:
>     What the hell does a comparison of an aggregate mean?  
> 
> What it always has!  do_jump has supported it for over a decade!
...
> Yes and no.  Sure, only Ada *uses* it, but these things have always been
> supported in the middle-end and are defined in the tree structure, so not
> implementing those things as part of the tree-ssa work is a major regression.

I disagree.  Personally I see this as Ada front-end bits having
unnecessarily percolated into the middle-end.  It's easy to 
understand how that could happen with you maintaining gcc for
all those years.

What you're saying is that we the tree-ssa team should have blindly
re-implemented every strange quirk that might be hiding in expr.c
without regard to whether or not it's still useful, used, or indeed
the best approach to the problem at hand.

I think not.

Indeed, I'd like to take this opportunity to move stuff that's really
Ada specific back into the Ada front end.  That's not going to be all
of the things you find, certainly, but definitely some of it.

Comparison of aggregates should be right at the top of that list.
We've already heard from Paul that expanding to memcmp would be 
incorrect for Fortran; an existance proof that this is indeed a
language-specific semantic and thus should be handled by the 
language.


r~