eieio • Hacker News Board

Re: eieio

#11

Post by shailesh18feb81 » Fri, May 29, 2009, 9:49 AM UTC

looks like eieio came from IBM...not sure about sex (sign extend) instruction though.

Re: eieio

#12

Post by mseebach » Fri, May 29, 2009, 9:59 AM UTC

This joke is attributed to Linus Thorvals:

IBM motto: "We found five vowels hiding in a corner, and we used them _all_ for the 'eieio' instruction so that we wouldn't have to use them anywhere else"

Unsourced history of eieio and sex: http://www.mail-archive.com/linux-fbdev@vuser.vu.union.edu/m...

Re: eieio

#13

Post by asciilifeform » Fri, May 29, 2009, 1:38 PM UTC

duskwuff wrote: post #6

lsb wrote: post #4

I wonder what they called POPCOUNT.

Sadly, there is no population-count instruction on PowerPC. The closest thing you get is cntlzw (Count Leading Zeroes Word).

> Sadly, there is no population-count instruction on PowerPC

Here is one man's theory as to why:

http://www.moyogo.com/blog/2005/09/secret-opcodes.html

Re: eieio

#14

Post by wmf » Fri, May 29, 2009, 5:57 PM UTC

mrbuwch wrote: post #9

This brings back (mostly) fond memories of writing PowerPC assembler many years ago. One thing that seems odd to me is that the author credits Motorola with naming of the eieio instruction. I would have thought that instruction would have been in the original Power instruction set and thus it would have been IBM that named it. Anyone know?

He probably just thinks Moto invented PowerPC.