30 Sep
2010
30 Sep
'10
4:53 a.m.
On Thu, Sep 30, 2010 at 12:22 AM, Greg 'groggy' Lehey <grog(a)lemis.com>
wrote:
Remember the
autoincrement registers? Even in those days they looked like a
kludge, but they helped a lot.
I hardly ever used them, but I can't remember exactly why not. I
remember writing quite a few subroutine libraries in PAL/8, and of
course you didn't want to steal them from the main program.
It's funny how long octal clung on. It should
have gone away with 8
bit bytes.
Octal made some sense on the PDP-11, with its 3-bit register fields,
even though the instructions were 16 bits. I think the notation got
stabilized in the culture just because it was included in C. In my
pre-announcement review of Go (not a work assignment, just something I
went and did when I was at Google) I urged them to remove octal from
integer, character, and string literals, but nope, they are still
there. For one thing, it means that literals interoperate among C,
C++, and Go, though I don't know if that was the motivation.
But somehow I still have a soft spot for octal, and
numbers like 7778 still look wrong.
/me chuckles.
Hmm. Am I expected to understand this?
No.