Structured Fortran - was Re: Self modifying code, lambda calculus

Paul Koning paulkoning at comcast.net
Wed Sep 23 09:43:26 CDT 2015


> On Sep 23, 2015, at 10:30 AM, Jay Jaeger <cube1 at charter.net> wrote:
> 
> On 9/23/2015 9:10 AM, Mouse wrote:
>>> I am 100% certain, for example, that it would be possible to come up
>>> with a C compiler for a 40K IBM 1410, which is in the set you
>>> describe.
>> 
>> Possible?  Sure.  But it would be difficult; you would need to simulate
>> a binary machine - C has a whole bunch of stuff that is defined to
>> operate "as if" certain things are stored in binary. 

Worse yet, two's complement binary.  At least nowadays.  Which makes me suspect that there had to be some shortcuts taken when C was implemented on the CDC 6000 series.

(Interestingly enough, if you ignore that little detail, it isn't terribly hard to write the skeleton of a 6000 code generator back-end for GCC...)

	paul




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