[LLVMdev] LLVMdev Digest, Vol 80, Issue 13

[Reid Kleckner]

On Mon, Feb 14, 2011 at 3:49 PM, Peter Lawrence
<peterl95124 at sbcglobal.net> wrote:
> Andrew,
>                your response highlights a naming problem in LLVM,
> which is that  "array" and "vector"
> mean the same thing in normal computer language and compiler theory
> usage, so it is
> inconvenient and misleading within LLVM to give one a very specific
> meaning that is different
> from the other....

The only place in CS I know of that "vector" is used to mean
arbitrarily long sequence of elements is the C++ STL vector template
class.  So far as I know in the field of compilers "vectorization"
always refers to lowering code down to use SIMD operations.

> to the LLVM developers I would suggest using the term "packed" to
> refer to the type of
> data that the SPARC-VIS, the PPC-Altivec, and the Intel-mmx/sse
> (among others) instruction
> sets support.

"packed" is already used to refer to "packed structs", ie structs
without any padding.

Reid