28 Sep
2021
28 Sep
'21
1:24 p.m.
On Sep 28, 2021, at 3:15 PM, ben via cctalk <cctalk
at classiccmp.org> wrote:
On 2021-09-28 11:43 a.m., Vincent Long standing via cctalk wrote:
Python does, its "int" type handles numbers of any size, so long as it fits in
memory. If you create sufficiently large numbers it may take a while to do arithmetic
operations, of course.
The C standards are more liberal, and continue to
require char types to be 8 or more bits.
Was PL/I the only language that would let
you select data size for variables? Of course the fine print would not let you have more
than 16
decimal digits, or 32 bit binary. You would think by now that a language
could handle any length data. In principle
then, char could still be 9 or more bits, but if int8_t is required for a *NIX, who would
do it? They'd just be making a compatibility mess for themselves.
Is it not a mess already as hardware keeps changing standards.
Look at USB or all the kinds of network protocols. > It's also unclear to me whether one's
complement representation would be allowed. (Various other representations would probably
be prohibited by other restrictions.)
C certainly has been run on one's complement machines (CDC 6000 series) but I've
heard it stated by some who would know that the current standard expects two's
complement. Interestingly enough, floating point data is, in IEEE and a number of other
formats, sign/magnitude encoded, not two's complement. Some old machines used
one's complement for float, though.
My next computer will be 44 bits, if I ever get the
routing timing bugs out the FPGA
prototype card. I can't change the FPGA vender because I can use TTL macros like
74181, for TTL bread boarding.
With the 74181 I can have any width I want, thus I can play with odd sizes.
For extra credit, create a GCC back end for that design. :-)
More I play with my designs, I come to the conclusion
that
32 bits is not ample for a general purpose computer.
I think Von Neumann would agree; he picked 40 bits as I recall. There are all sorts of
interesting word lengths out there; the strangest I've worked with is 27 bits
one's complement.
paul