22 Feb
2009
22 Feb
'09
11:58 p.m.
On 22 Feb 2009 at 22:17, Allison wrote:
Your kidding tight? ;)
JRT pascal was fairly buggy itself and it was till arond V3 that it stopped being
noticalbly so.
Buggy or not, the V20 wouldn't run it. Rich Naro verified the bug
and published a MicroNote on it. And JRT was comparatively popular
for the time. It boils down to the V20 not being able to run a
commercially available 8080 product because of a fault in the CPU.
Suppose a customer used an application written and deployed with JRT
Pascal. What do we tell him? "JRT Pascal--ho, ho, ha, you must be
kidding...."
Nope, serious business. Who knows what other product could have used
the same coding technique?
In a way, this was deja vu of a much earlier problem with the NEC
version of the 8080, where NEC left the carry bit unaffected after a
boolean operation, where Intel reset it. Considering that many 8080
programs cleared the carry bit with something like "ORA A", do you
think that CP/M would have run with the old NEC chip?
--Chuck