Who is the world's oldest working programmer?

On Mon, Sep 29, 2014 at 7:06 PM, Sean Conner <spc at conman.org> wrote: Actually, if you *can* address a single BCD digit, that will make C hard to support, because C requires that all data types have sizes of a multiple of the size of the character type, and the character type is required to have a range of at least -127 to +127 (for signed char) or 0 to 255 for unsigned char. It would seem that the easiest way to do that on a BCD machine would be to use groups of three digits (or more) as a char, and have a lot of the possible machine values of those groups be illegal. This is essentially the same reason that a compliant C on a PDP-10 would have to use 9, 12, 18, or 36 bit characters, and not directly support the normal PDP-10 native 6-bit and 7-bit characters.