12 Jul
2025
12 Jul
'25
11:28 p.m.
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(a)offog.org> <http://offog.org/>