🚀 go-pugleaf

In a recent article boyd@necisa.ho.necisa.oz (Boyd Roberts) writes:
>Didn't the CRISP (develloped at Bell Labs) have a branch direction bit?
>The upshot being that most of the time the branch direction was wrong.
>So negating the logic proved a big win.

It's not a hardware item, but the first FORTRAN I ever used (FORTRAN II
under FMS -- Fortran Monitor System -- on a 7090) included a statement
to tell the compiler the anticipated distribution of results in an
arithmetic IF.  My old manual is buried where I haven't seen it in years,
but the format was something like:

      FREQUENCY  mm,zz,pp

for the three possibilities.  (Don't ask me what happened if mm+zz+pp != 100.
Maybe there were just two parameters.)  The idea was that the compiler could
optimize the machine code and save a few cycles.

As I recall the FMS system documentation stated that the FREQUENCY statement
would be accepted and syntax-checked but otherwise ignored.  I never saw
any other implementation of the statement.

Joe Morris