18 Jan
2017
18 Jan
'17
10:42 p.m.
On Wed, Jan 18, 2017 at 1:04 PM, Steve Johnson <scj(a)yaccman.com> wrote:
The PDP-10 and the GE/Honeywell were the two machines
I recall that
elicited Dennis' comment about 10-track tape drives. When I ported C to
the Honeywell machine at the Murray Hill comp center, I used 9-bit bytes as
the default, and added a syntax `abcd` to create a constant in the 6-bit
character set. Most of the OS calls used 6-bit characters, although the
time-sharing system was moving to 9-bits. And most of the use of C on the
Honeywell was in the time-sharing system.
Quite a few years later, I discovered accidentally that the syntax `abcd`
was still accepted on the Sun compiler, that had been based on PCC. It
drew some kind of error message like "GCOS characters not supported",
presumably because some switch was turned off in the machine-dependent
files...
Steve
r 13:40 0.072 1
qedx
i
main () {
int i;
i = `abcd`;
}
\f
w foo.c
q
r 13:41 0.169 3
sl3p>cc>x>cc foo
linkage_editor: Entry
not found. foo
r 13:41 0.276 50
sl3p>cc>x>cc foo.c
"", line 3:
gcos BCD constant illegal
cc: An error has occurred while Compiling foo.c.
r 13:41 3.575 211
-- Charles