15 Oct
2005
15 Oct
'05
9:33 a.m.
>>>> "Chuck" == Chuck Guzis
<cclist at sydex.com> writes:
Chuck> On 10/14/2005 at 5:29 PM Paul Koning wrote:
> C is the obvious choice. In either case, you have
to be careful
> that you don't wreck the portability by using non-portable I/O.
Chuck> Is it? Given that we don't have 20-20 prescience, how about
Chuck> 20-20 hindsight? Could you implement C on any computer with
Chuck> sufficient memory?
Chuck> How about an IBM 1401, 1620 or 7080? What would you do with
Chuck> all of those nice operators such as <<, >>, &, |, and ^, given
Chuck> that these were decimal machines? OTOH, FORTRAN's been
Chuck> implemented on all of these.
Good point. I believe C needs to be implemented on a binary machine,
and anything other than two's complement is problematic (though, I
think, possible). It also prefers byte addressable machines with
power of 2 word lengths, though that too can be worked around. (There
is a GCC implementation for the DEC-10 -- though not as far as I know
for the CDC 6600.)
paul