30 Sep
2014
30 Sep
'14
8:40 a.m.
-----Original Message-----
From: cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org [mailto:cctalk-bounces at classiccmp.org] On Behalf
Of ben
Sent: 30 September 2014 15:56
To: cctalk at classiccmp.org
Subject: Re: Who is the world's oldest working programmer?
On 9/30/2014 2:22 AM, Eric Smith wrote:
Can't you use the trigraph '??/' for '\' ....
Dave
On Tue, Sep 30, 2014 at 2:08 AM, ben
<bfranchuk at jetnet.ab.ca> wrote:
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.
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. 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.