[TUHS] [TUHS} PDP-11, Unix, octal?

Charles Anthony charles.unix.pro at gmail.com
Thu Jan 19 07:42:33 AEST 2017


On Wed, Jan 18, 2017 at 1:04 PM, Steve Johnson <scj at yaccman.com> wrote:

> The PDP-10 and the GE/Honeywell were the two machines I recall that
> elicited Dennis' comment about 10-track tape drives.  When I ported C to
> the Honeywell machine at the Murray Hill comp center, I used 9-bit bytes as
> the default, and added a syntax `abcd` to create a constant in the 6-bit
> character set.  Most of the OS calls used 6-bit characters, although the
> time-sharing system was moving to 9-bits.  And most of the use of C on the
> Honeywell was in the time-sharing system.
>
> Quite a few years later, I discovered accidentally that the syntax `abcd`
> was still accepted on the Sun compiler, that had been based on PCC.  It
> drew some kind of error message like "GCOS characters not supported",
> presumably because some switch was turned off in the machine-dependent
> files...
>
> Steve
>
> r 13:40 0.072 1

qedx
i
main () {
  int i;
  i = `abcd`;
}
\f
w foo.c
q
r 13:41 0.169 3

>sl3p>cc>x>cc foo
linkage_editor: Entry not found. foo
r 13:41 0.276 50

>sl3p>cc>x>cc foo.c
"", line 3: gcos BCD constant illegal
cc: An error has occurred while Compiling foo.c.
r 13:41 3.575 211


-- Charles
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