20 May
2016
20 May
'16
10:14 p.m.
It was thus said that the Great William Donzelli once stated:
Oh my! I'm reading the manual for the C compiler for the Unisys 2200 [1]
system and it's dated 2013! And yes, it does appear to be a 36-bit non-byte
addressable system.
Wow!
I am finding chapter 14 ("Strategies for Writing Efficient Code") amusing
("don't use pointers!" "don't use loops!") I suppose this is
1's complement
but I see nothing about that in the manual, nor do I see any system limits
(like INT_MAX, CHAR_MAX, etc).
-spc (Color me surprised!)
[1] https://public.support.unisys.com/2200/docs/cp15.0/pdf/78310430-016.pdf
First off,
can you supply a list of architectures that are NOT 2's
complement integer math that are still made and in active use today? As far
as I can tell, there was only one signed-magnitude architecture ever
commercially available (and that in the early 60s) and only a few 1's
complement architectures from the 60s (possibly up to the early 70s) that
*might* still be in active use.
There are probably a couple hundred Unisys 2200 systems left in the
world (no one really knows the true number). Of course, when the C
standards were being drawn up, there were many more, with a small but
significant share of the mainframe market.