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

[Peter Pentchev via COFF]

On Wed, May 27, 2026 at 04:15:03PM +0300, Peter Pentchev wrote:
> 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.

...of course, with the exception, mentioned in my previous e-mail, of
the stdint.h header in C99 and later which defines uint32_t, int16_t, etc.

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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