generic vectors: how should they work?

[David Edelsohn]

>>>>> James E Wilson writes:

James> I think the biggest hole is the lack of an operator to extract an 
James> element from a vector.  If you want target independent code to extract 
James> an element from a vector, then you have to use a union.  However, once 
James> you use a union, you no longer have vector operations, and can't use the 
James> hardware vector instructions.  Instead, what happens is that the vector 
James> gets forced into a stack slot so we can index into it.  Maybe we could 
James> reuse the array syntax for this, e.g vector[0] to extract the first 
James> element of the vector?

	Honza submitted a patch to implement additional init/set/extract
expanders, but the second patch never was reviewed.

http://gcc.gnu.org/ml/gcc-patches/2004-01/msg00050.html

David