Structured Fortran - was Re: Self modifying code, lambda calculus

Fred Cisin cisin at xenosoft.com
Thu Sep 24 11:06:25 CDT 2015


On Wed, 23 Sep 2015, Eric Smith wrote:
> And the length of a char?  It's required that all types other than
> bitfields be fully represented as multiple chars, not e.g. an int
> being two and a half chars, and a char has to cover at least the range
> 0..255, or -128..127, and it has to have a range based on a power of
> two.
> ISO/IEC 9899:1999(E) §3.6 ¶1  . . .
> ISO/IEC 9899:1999(E) §3.7.1 ¶1 . . . 
> ISO/IEC 9899:1999(E) §5.2.4.2.1 ¶1 . . . 
> ISO/IEC 9899:1999(E) §6.2.6.1 ¶2-4 - everything other than bitfields
> consists of bytes
> ISO/IEC 9899:1999(E) §6.2.6.1 ¶5 - Some data types other than char may
> ISO/IEC 9899:199(E) §6.2.6.2 ¶1 - unsigned integer types must have a
> ISO/IEC 9899:199(E) §6.2.6.2 ¶2 - signed integer types must have a
> On a decimal machine, if you use three digits for a char, you have to
> arrange that all your other types are multiples of three digits, with
> each three-digit group only using valid char representations, because
> accessing a char/byte out of a larger integer type is not allowed to
> be a trap representation, because chars can't have a trap
> representation.
> If an unsigned char is three digits with values from 0..255, an
> unsigned int can't be five digits. It has to be six digits, and the
> only valid representations for it would have values of 0..65535. It
> can't have any valid values in the range of 65536..999999.

The original "challenge" just said "C".
THAT is all ANSI C.
K&R C did not have those limitations.  If you wanted to build a C with a 7 
bit short, a 13 bit int, and a 19 bit long, it was OK.
Only limits were that the sizeof an int couldn't be smaller than the size 
of a short, sizeof a long couldn't be less than that of an int, etc.

I am not claiming that I could create a C compiler for 1401/1410, but 
these restrictions only preclude ANSI C.
Note: I am also not saying that doing so would be a good idea.



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