Re: [TUHS] 2.11BSD cross compiler

On Tue, Sep 28, 2010 at 10:14:09PM -0400, John Cowan wrote: Color me old school. I like MIPS, I worked at SGI (got married to an old school MIPS gal) but PDP-11 is so frigging intuitive. How can you not understand that instruction set? If you can't, well, sorry, not so much in my book. It's like a stripped down C. Come on - has anyone ever seen a better instruction set? More complicated, yeah, holy moly, yeah. But cleaner? We owe DEC for that one. That said, John is, as always, (probably) right. He's certainly right if we are talking about skills that go to today's market, PDP-11 is not so much. I said "probably" because I suspect there are some people for whom the light will go on if they do PDP-11 assembler but not so much on MIPS. Personally, I like anyone who can do any assembler. One of my interview questions is "have you written swtch?" If you don't get the question you are not an OS person, if you are, of course you get it. In any assembler (I wrote it in VAX, M68K, NS32032 though that last one was wishful thinking - I still wish that one hadn't been so buggy). All this late night rambling aside, +1 on the efforts of Nick, +1 on anyone who groks PDP-11 assembly. Those are soon to be lost skills and I admire them. Had a TA who could read octal dumps just like they were C. Ken Witte - wonder where he is now. I used to bribe him with a six pack to come over and help me and he'd have a beer in his hand and the line printer output in the other and be laughing at me for some retarded thing I had done that he figured out from the octal. -- --- Larry McVoy lm at bitmover.com http://www.bitkeeper.com