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

[Peter Pentchev via COFF]

On Tue, May 26, 2026 at 05:11:29PM -0700, Larry McVoy via COFF wrote:
> 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.

Yeah, C99 introduced the stdint.h header, but before that everyone and
their pet smeerp carried those around.

G'luck,
Peter

-- 
Peter Pentchev  roam at ringlet.net roam at debian.org peter at morpheusly.com
PGP key:        https://www.ringlet.net/roam/roam.key.asc
Key fingerprint 2EE7 A7A5 17FC 124C F115  C354 651E EFB0 2527 DF13
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