C out of its comfort zone - Re: Structured Fortran - was Re: Self modifying code

[Chuck Guzis]

On 09/23/2015 10:21 AM, Zane H. Healy wrote:
> On Sep 23, 2015, at 9:25 AM, Noel Chiappa <jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu>
> wrote:
>
>>> From: Toby Thain
>>
>>> It did exist for some exotic, word addressed architectures
>>
>> {Innocent look}
>>
>> You mean, like the PDP-10?
>>
>> {Ducks!}
>>
>> Noel
>
> Strangest C I saw was on a DPS-8 mainframe running GCOS-8.
>
> Zane

Well, there are plenty of word-but-not-byte/character addressable 
machines out there, which makes life interesting for the likes of C. 
FORTRAN (at least FORTRAN IV) never had any problems with that, as the 
CHARACTER datatype didn't yet exist in the language, but for the 
occasional vendor "extension".  Later versions of FORTRAN/Fortran, of 
course did.

The CDC 6000 series for example.  Ones complement, 60-bit 
word-addressable system used well into the 1980s, as opposed to 
bit-addressable CDC machines like the STAR.  Interestingly COBOL on the 
6000 easily outran most COBOL implementations on 
byte/character-addressable machines.

One thing that I've wondered about is "does the current HLL-du-juor 
dictate processor architecture?"--and not the reverse.  Does anyone 
consider a machine that doesn't implement any sort of hardware stack, 
for example, a marketplace contender?

--Chuck