17 Oct
2011
17 Oct
'11
2:46 p.m.
From: Eric Smith
Sent: Saturday, October 15, 2011 7:20 PM
ben wrote:
> Did the PDP-10 have a good C complier?
There were at least two C compilers, but I don't
have any experience
with them so I can't comment on how good they were.
KCC was good enough for a software engineer at XKL to port Perl 4 and
GNU Emacs 18.58 (the reason for the Perl port was to run configure),
and a whole bunch of Unix utilities. This was a selling point of the
Toad-1.
I've never seen anything other than toy programs written in the GCC
port, because the libraries were never ported (to the best of my
knowledge).
Another C trivia question: if you implement standard C
on a PDP-10, a
36-bit machine, what are the permissible sizes (in bits) for the char
type?
Beaten to death already, but I wanted to mention that the internal size
in KCC is 9 bits, with translation to 7-bit ASCII. GNU Emacs on the
Toad-1 can read an 8-bit Unix or Windows text file (that is, one sent
via FTP as binary), edit it, and save it out as 7-bit ASCII. (High-bit
characters bite it.)
Rich Alderson
Vintage Computing Sr. Server Engineer
Vulcan, Inc.
505 5th Avenue S, Suite 900
Seattle, WA 98104
mailto:RichA at vulcan.com
mailto:RichA at LivingComputerMuseum.org
http://www.LivingComputerMuseum.org/