25 Apr
2021
25 Apr
'21
8:04 p.m.
Thank you for the tip!
I had seen the revival when googling around. The M68K version looks like an interesting
option for my intended project(s). Still, I also would like to work with the versions from
the early 80’s, just to get a better feel for the history of it all and to start with
something small (the revival is 2-3 times the size of the early 80’s code *).
On top of that, there is something magical about real-life machine descriptions that fit
in 400 short lines.
Paul
*) On 32V the actual virtual address space for a process was limited to 192KB, due to how
the MMU was used.
On Apr 25, 2021, at 2:49 PM, arnold(a)skeeve.com wrote:
Not an answer to your questions, but you may want to take a look
at the PCC Revived project. It lives in CVS, but I have a git mirror at
git://github.com/arnoldrobbins/pcc-revived
HTH,
Arnold
Paul Ruizendaal <pnr(a)planet.nl> wrote:
> For clarity and ease of reference:
>
> - The “Tour of paper” is for instance here:
http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/summary?doi=10.1.1.48.3512
>
> - A machine description for the VAX that matches with that paper is for instance in
the SysIII source:
https://www.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=SysIII/usr/src/cmd/cc/vax/pcc/ta…
>
> - The new style description in 8th edition is here:
https://www.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=V8/usr/src/cmd/ccom/vax/stin
>
> - The program that translates the “stin” file to a “table.c” file is here:
https://www.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/utree.pl?file=V8/usr/src/cmd/ccom/common/sty.y
>
>
> ====
>
> Sometimes one thing leads to another.
>
> Following the recent mention of some retro-brew 68K single board systems, I decided
to build a CB030 board (in progress). I figure it is a rough proxy for a 1980 VAX and
would allow for some experimentation with the 32V / SysIII / 8th edition code.
>
> My first thought was to use the M68K compiler that is included with the Blit sources
(see THUS Archive for this), as I had used that before to explore some of the Blit source.
That compiler is LP32, not ILP32 - which may be a source of trouble. Just changing the
SZINT parameter yielded some issues, so I started looking at the PCC source.
>
> This source does not have a “table.c” in the well known format as described in the “A
tour of the portable C compiler” paper. Instead it uses a file “stin” which appears to be
in a more compact format and is translated into a “table.c” file by a new pre-processor
("sty.y”). Then looking at the VAX compilers for 8th and 10th edition, these too use
this “stin” file.
>
> All the other m68K compilers (based on pcc) that I found appear to derive from the
V7/32V/SysIII lineage, not from the 8th edition lineage.
>
> A quick google did not yield much background or documentation on the STY format.
>
> Anybody on this list that can shed some light on the history of the STY table and on
how to use it? Any surviving reports or memos that would be useful?
>
> Many thanks in advance
>
> Paul
>