[COFF] [TUHS] Re: Hypothetical: Could MULTICS have been written in C, if available?

[Larry McVoy via COFF]

On Tue, May 26, 2026 at 01:30:35PM -0400, Noel Chiappa via COFF wrote:
>   dcl global_handle bit(36) aligned static;
> 
> with the word length of the machine in the source. (It's true that C has the
> opposite prolem - one that's a real issue in writing networking code -
> other than bit fields, C declarations don't let you be explicit about
> data sizes.)

>From BitKeeper's libc/style.h which you can see at

http://mcvoy.com/lm/tmp/style.h

/* types */
typedef unsigned char           u8;
typedef unsigned short          u16;
typedef unsigned int            u32;
typedef unsigned long long      u64;
typedef signed char             i8;
typedef signed short            i16;
typedef signed int              i32;
typedef signed long long        i64;

those have worked for the last 27 years on pretty much every platform, we
never had to ifdef those.  I'm not saying they will work forever but they
have worked for a long time.

And I've always found it annoying that modern C didn't have those so I
made them for our source.

--lm