[TUHS] Toronto's Numerical Turing compiler

Adam Sampson ats at offog.org
Sun Jul 13 09:28:30 AEST 2025


Hi TUHS,

A poster on the Stardot Acorn forum asked whether the Numerical Turing
compiler had survived. I figure this is probably the best place to ask.

Numerical Turing was a mid-80s variant of the University of Toronto's
Turing programme language that provided arbitrary-precision decimal
float arithmetic, developed by Tom Hull and others.

It's described in this paper:
  https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/1057947.1057949

It ran on Toronto's ai VAX under 4.2BSD. The paper mentions the compiler
ntc and its man page, the demo program ntdemo.x, and the standard
include directory /usr/include/nt. There are a few references to it in
the utzoo Usenet archive but it looks like it was distributed upon
request.

Has anybody seen a surviving copy?

Thanks,

-- 
Adam Sampson <ats at offog.org>                         <http://offog.org/>


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