30 Sep
2014
30 Sep
'14
7:56 a.m.
On 9/30/2014 2:22 AM, Eric Smith wrote:
On Tue, Sep 30, 2014 at 2:08 AM, ben <bfranchuk at
jetnet.ab.ca> wrote:
C is so tied with UNIX and B it hard to say just who was first with
what. For decimal C like lang, you still need backslash and delete so
the character set needs to hacked.
Ben.
I would go with 2 BCD digits for characters.
Control is NULL/CR/TAB/LF + 96 ASCII characters.
Certainly you could write a compiler that does that. By definition,
however, it will not be a C compiler. It might be a compiler for a
roughly C-like language, but not C.
But I suspect C would be different if the base
machine was NOT a PDP-11.
It is well-documented that many of the C features that people seem to
think came from the PDP-11 architecture predate PDP-11 C, and actually
came from PDP-7 C. As you're probably aware, the PDP-7 and PDP-11
architectures are *extremely* different. To a first approximation,
the PDP-4/7/9/15 line is like an 18-bit-wide PDP-8.