[TUHS] Typesetter C compiler

Noel Chiappa jnc at mercury.lcs.mit.edu
Fri Feb 3 05:02:32 AEST 2023


There was recent discussion here about the Typesetter C compiler; I don't
have the energy to look through the tons of opinion posts about recent
programming styles, to find the posts about actual Unix history which related
to that compiler, but I seem to recall that there was interest in locating
the source for it? I had strted to look, but then got distracted by some
other high-pri stuff; here are a few notes that I had accumulated to reply -
I hope they aren't too out-of-date by now.

I have a copy of it, from the dump of the CSR machine (I can't make the whole
dump public, sorry; it has personal material from a bunch of people mixed in).

I was pretty sure the C compiler from Mini-Unix, here:

  https://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=Mini-Unix/usr/source/c

was from the right timeframe to be the Typesetter C, but a quick check of
c0.h, shows that it's not; that one seems to be more like the V6 one. (Ditto
for LSX.)

The PWB1 one:

  https://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=PWB1/sys/c/c

seems, from a very quick look at c0.h (using that nice side-by-side compare
feature on the TUHS archive - thanks, Warren!), to be somewhat close to the
Typesetter C. It would be interesting to compare that one to the CSR one
(which definitely is) to be sure.

Also, the V7 C compiler (not pcc, but the PDP-11 one) seems to be a fairly
close relative, too.

	Noel


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