Converting C for KCC on TOPS20

[Guy Sotomayor Jr]

I think the challenge will be does binutils (where nm, objcopy and objdump live) support for the object file format used by TOPS20.

I haven’t looked at the TOPS20 object file format but it seems like the best approach would be to have the C compiler generate symbols as it normally would and write a utility to “fixup” the too long symbols rather than munging the source (which is basically what you’re proposing using the stuff from binutils…just a bit more work.

TTFN - Guy

> On Dec 11, 2019, at 9:07 AM, Guy N. via cctalk <cctalk at classiccmp.org> wrote:
> 
> On Wed, 2019-12-11 at 00:25 +0000, David Griffith via cctalk wrote:
>> I'm trying to convert some C code[1] so it'll compile on TOPS20 with KCC. 
>> KCC is mostly ANSI compliant, but it needs to use the TOPS20 linker, which 
>> has a limit of six case-insentive characters.  [...] Does anyone here have 
>> any knowledge of existing tools or techniques to do what I'm trying to do?
> 
> Is "objcopy --redefine-syms" any help?  Compile the code as-is to
> produce object files, use nm or objdump to find all of the global
> symbols, generate unique six-character names for them, and then use
> objcopy to create new object files with the new names.
> 
> Or have I completely missed the point?  I'm not familiar with KCC, does
> it produce object modules in a format objcopy doesn't support?
> 
> I know someone who was working on gcc support for the PDP-10, I wonder
> if he's still doing that or has given up....
>