26 Mar
2016
26 Mar
'16
10:29 p.m.
On 2016-03-26 22:03, John Cowan wrote:
Johnny Billquist scripsit:
Well, I was talking filenames (as also the subject says)... :-)
On the PDP-8, you sometimes saw @ used as a prefix character in SIXBIT.
So you'd use @M to get a CR, and @J for an LF, and @@ would mark the end
of the string. But not for filenames. But in code, since you sometimes
used SIXBIT for string constants as well.
Johnny
--
Johnny Billquist || "I'm on a bus
|| on a psychedelic trip
email: bqt(a)softjar.se || Reading murder books
pdp is alive! || tryin' to stay hip" - B. Idol
SIXBIT dominated here for a long time. We see it
both in the PDP-8,
but also the PDP-6 and its follow ons. RAD50 was the natural
extension of SIXBIT on a machine that did not have a word size that
was a multiple of 6.
Well, for identifiers, yes. But SIXBIT was quite general, especially
if you repurposed two of the characters to mean "end of string" and
"CR+LF". The "@" was a popular choice for the former, perhaps
because
its encoding is 00; IIRC, "_" was popular for the latter.