[TUHS] speaking of early C compilers

[jsteve@superglobalmegacorp.com (Jason Stevens)]

has anyone ever tried to compile any of the old C compilers with a 'modern'
C compiler?

I tried a few from the 80's (Microsoft/Borland) and there is a bunch of
weird stuff where integers suddenly become structs, structures reference
fields that aren't in that struct,   

c01.c
        register int t1;
....
                t1->type = UNSIGN;


And my favorite which is closing a bunch of file handles for the heck of it,
and redirecting stdin/out/err from within the program instead of just
opening the file and using fread/fwrite.. 

c00.c
	if (freopen(argv[2], "w", stdout)==NULL ||
(sbufp=fopen(argv[3],"w"))==NULL)


How did any of this compile?  How did this stuff run without clobbering
each-other?

I don't know why but I started to look at this stuff with some half hearted
attempt at getting Apout running on Windows.  Naturally there is no fork, so
when a child process dies, the whole thing crashes out.  I guess I could
simulate a fork with threads and containing all the cpu variables to a
structure for each thread, but that sounds like a lot of work for a limited
audience.

But there really is some weird stuff in v7's c compiler.