[TUHS] PDP-8 (was: 2.11BSD cross compiler)
John Cowan
cowan at ccil.org
Thu Sep 30 14:53:55 AEST 2010
On Thu, Sep 30, 2010 at 12:22 AM, Greg 'groggy' Lehey <grog at lemis.com> wrote:
> Remember the
> autoincrement registers? Even in those days they looked like a
> kludge, but they helped a lot.
I hardly ever used them, but I can't remember exactly why not. I
remember writing quite a few subroutine libraries in PAL/8, and of
course you didn't want to steal them from the main program.
> It's funny how long octal clung on. It should have gone away with 8
> bit bytes.
Octal made some sense on the PDP-11, with its 3-bit register fields,
even though the instructions were 16 bits. I think the notation got
stabilized in the culture just because it was included in C. In my
pre-announcement review of Go (not a work assignment, just something I
went and did when I was at Google) I urged them to remove octal from
integer, character, and string literals, but nope, they are still
there. For one thing, it means that literals interoperate among C,
C++, and Go, though I don't know if that was the motivation.
> But somehow I still have a soft spot for octal, and
> numbers like 7778 still look wrong.
/me chuckles.
> Hmm. Am I expected to understand this?
No.
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