9 Jul
2024
9 Jul
'24
7:06 a.m.
Sorry if I'm mistaken, but I thought that we were talking about system
implementation languages. The languages discussed have their roots back
in the early days of using an HLL instead of assembly language for this.
One could certainly write the kernel in a subset [or a superset of a
subset] of the language that is used for everything else and I believe
it has been done before. (Is ESPOL a superset of Burroughs ALGOL?) One
could write the kernel in C and everything else in a *very* different
language.
I only mentioned single-precision floating point as an example of
BLISS-10 being operator-typed as opposed to data-typed, and then added
that a little floating point is useful for writing run-time libraries.
(For another example, a debugger might want to use floating point to
allow examining or depositing such a value.) I'd consider PDP-11 UNIX
to be an operating system, and it included some libraries and a
debugger. I can see that others might consider PDP-11 UNIX to be a
'distribution'. Sorry if I wandered too far afield.
- Aron
On 7/8/24 22:40, Dave Horsfall wrote:
On Mon, 8 Jul 2024, Adam Thornton wrote:
Indeed, S/390 Linux ran just fine on machines
without IEEE floating
point. Which meant that for years I had to jam `use integer` at the top
of any Perl I ran, because otherwise any Perl arithmetic at all would go
through the software float routines, which was very painful on little
machines, such as a P/390.
When it comes down to it, why would a kernel need floating point? Or are
you talking about the distribution instead of the OS?
-- Dave