18 bit CPU; was: Speed now & then

[Mark Linimon]

On Wed, Apr 11, 2018 at 11:45:07PM -0700, Chuck Guzis via cctalk wrote:
> Looks pretty much like standard C until you get into the minutiae, such
> as "A character constant is 1 to 4 characters" and page 4-4 "Data Types"
> (9 bit characters and 36 bit ints and 18 bit short ints).
> 
> So, it should be pretty straightforward unless you assume that a char
> is 8 bits, with a signed char having a range of +/-255.

"pretty straightforward"

Thanks.  I needed a laugh.

As someone who tries to get/keep a zillion open source packages building
on FreeBSD, on non-x86 archs, I constantly refer to a piece of paper that
hangs on my wall.  It was given to me many years ago at a conference, by
its author, Henry Spencer.  An annotated version may be found here:

  https://www.lysator.liu.se/c/ten-commandments.html

Of course these days s/VAX/32-bit Linux distro/, but the principle still
holds.

Finally, for any remaining disbelievers, the most recent update of
FreeBSD's toolchain to include Clang version 6, regressed 419 port
builds -- on x86 alone.

mcl