[TUHS] head/sed/tail (was The Unix shell: a 50-year view)

[Charles Anthony]

On Fri, Jul 16, 2021 at 7:20 AM Clem Cole <clemc at ccc.com> wrote:

>
>
> On Fri, Jul 16, 2021 at 4:05 AM Lars Brinkhoff <lars at nocrew.org> wrote:
>
>> Clem Cole wrote:
>> > The 'second' C compiler was a PDP-10 and Honeywell (36-bit) target
>> > Alan Synder did for his MIT Thesis.  It was originally targeted to ITS
>> > for the PDP-10, but it ran on Tops-20 also.  My >>memory<< is he used
>> > a 7-bit Character, ala SAIL, with 5 chars stored in a word with a bit
>> > leftover.
>>
>> On ITS it only ever stored characters as full 36-bit words!  So sizeof
>> char == 1 == sizeof int.  This is allowed per the C standard.  (Maybe it
>> was updated somewhere else, I dunno.)
>>
>
> Ah - that makes sense.  I never programmed the Honeywell in anything but
> Dartmouth BASIC (mostly) and any early FORTRAN (very little) and the whole
> idea of storage size was somewhat oblivious to me at the point as I was a
> youngster when I did that.  Any idea did the Honeywell treat chars as
> 36-bit entities also?  Steve, maybe you remember?
>
>
The Honeywell 6000 machines ran GCOS; the system standard was six six-bit
characters per word.

The Honeywell 6100 machines ran Multics; the system standard was four
nine-bit characters per word.

For Multics C, sizeof (*) != sizeof (int) and NULL != 0, so a lot of
"portable" C code wasn't.

-- Charles
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://minnie.tuhs.org/pipermail/tuhs/attachments/20210716/0df0ddf2/attachment.htm>