[TUHS] Any UNIX With No C In Userland?

[John Levine]

It appears that Phil Budne <phil at ultimate.com> said:
>Noel Chiappa wrote:
>>     > From: Larry McVoy
>>
>>     > Not once did I think about packing, the structs somehow just worked on
>>     > the machines I was working on. Maybe the TCP/IP guys knew about spacing
>>     > in the structs.
>>
>> Not really! Of the first 6 TCP/IP implementations:
>> only 1 was in C - and it was a relatively late one. The earliest ones were
>> mostly in assembler (PDP-10 and PDP-11).
>
>BUT, the basic TCP and IP protocols seem to have been created with a
>general care that two byte fields should be aligned at multiples of
>two bytes and four byte fields should be at multiples of four bytes,
>or at the VERY least, no multi-byte field should cross a four byte
>boundary (which would have been a pain to PDP-10 programmers who
>likely expected 32 bits of data in each 36 bit word).

There were a bunch of S/360 systems, which also need two- and
four-byte fiekds to be aligned unless you do extra byte string moves
to pack and unpack the structures.

>And as for C: It was born on a 16-bit word system that expected 16-bit
>aligned words, replacing B, a language with just the word datatype, on
>a system with a 32KB (or less) user space, by people who had just come
>from a project where waiting for working production PL/I compiler had
>been a major headache, and generally suffered from "second system
>syndrome" bloat.

I believe the earliest versions of C were on a GE 635, a word addressed
machine comparable to a PDP-10.  But it moved to a PDP-11 soon enough
where the byte and word addresses motivated the datatypes that turned
B into C.

R's,
John