llvm dev - May 2017 - What is "splat" in BUILD_VECTOR?

Hi All,

  First of all, I am not native English speaker. While reading BUILD_VECTOR
related code, for example,
PPCTargetLowering::LowerBUILD_VECTOR, I see "splat" here and there.
Could
someone explain what
it is (does splat mean the same thing across the whole code base)? Besides,
from my English dictionary,
I don't know why we call such thing as "splat"... :p

Regards,
chenwj

-- 
Wei-Ren Chen (陳韋任)
Homepage: https://people.cs.nctu.edu.tw/~chenwj
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Splat means to take a single value and build a vector out of identical
copies of that value. 4 ->  [4,4,4,4]

I'm not sure where the term came from.

On May 6, 2017 8:08 PM, "陳韋任 via llvm-dev" <llvm-dev at
lists.llvm.org> wrote:
> Hi All,
>
>   First of all, I am not native English speaker. While reading
> BUILD_VECTOR related code, for example,
> PPCTargetLowering::LowerBUILD_VECTOR, I see "splat" here and
there. Could
> someone explain what
> it is (does splat mean the same thing across the whole code base)?
> Besides, from my English dictionary,
> I don't know why we call such thing as "splat"... :p
>
> Regards,
> chenwj
>
> --
> Wei-Ren Chen (陳韋任)
> Homepage: https://people.cs.nctu.edu.tw/~chenwj
>
> _______________________________________________
> LLVM Developers mailing list
> llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org
> http://lists.llvm.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/llvm-dev
>
>
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On Sat, 6 May 2017 20:11:17 -0700 Kyle Butt via llvm-dev
<llvm-dev at lists.llvm.org> wrote:
> Splat means to take a single value and build a vector out of
> identical copies of that value. 4 ->  [4,4,4,4]
> 
> I'm not sure where the term came from.
I was wondering this myself.

Would it be possible (in the spirit of the other discussion) to put
a clean explanation of this into http://llvm.org/docs/Lexicon.html ?
(That was where I first looked for an answer.)

Perry
-- 
Perry E. Metzger		perry at piermont.com