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

[Peter Pentchev via COFF]

On Wed, May 27, 2026 at 06:49:42AM -0400, Noel Chiappa via COFF wrote:
>     > From: Larry McVoy
> 
>     > From BitKeeper's libc/style.h 
>     > ...
>     > typedef signed char             i8;
>     > typedef signed short            i16;
>     > typedef signed int              i32;
>     > typedef signed long long        i64;
> 
> As I've mentioned before, I did something similar for portable networking
> code we wrote at MIT; our types were all 'xxxy', where 'xxx' were the
> semantics (signed integer, unsigned integer, none, etc) and 'y' was the size
> - but richer than the above list: in addition to 8,16,32 (used for giving
> packet formats) we also had 'f' (at least 16 bits, but whatever was fastest
> on the architecture/compiler at hand - 16 bits on the early MC68000's); 'w'
> (the word lenth - address size - of the machine); etc.
> 
> The resultant code was wonderfully portable; I once, on a bet, managed to
> move our portable real-time OS (written with these declarations) to a new
> machine (the AMD 29000) literally overnight; I pulled an all-nighter, and
> it was runing when people got there the next morning.
> 
>     > those have worked for the last 27 years on pretty much every platform,
> 
> In that later era, OK. They would not have worked in mine; on a PDP-11, an
> 'int' was 16 bits. (I wonder how long an 'int' is on modern 64-bit
> architectures? They probably had to keep it at 32 bits, or it would have
> broken too much code

Correct, it is 32 bits on most architectures.

> - or was it defined to always be 32 bits in later C specs?)

No, the C standard has never mandated exact sizes for any of those types.

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
-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: signature.asc
Type: application/pgp-signature
Size: 833 bytes
Desc: not available
URL: <http://www.tuhs.org/pipermail/coff/attachments/20260527/967fb882/attachment.sig>