From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: cowan@ccil.org (John Cowan) Date: Thu, 30 Sep 2010 00:53:55 -0400 Subject: [TUHS] PDP-8 (was: 2.11BSD cross compiler) In-Reply-To: <20100930042229.GA66070@dereel.lemis.com> References: <20100929005148.GA8032@bitmover.com> <20100929023819.GA12919@bitmover.com> <20100930042229.GA66070@dereel.lemis.com> Message-ID: On Thu, Sep 30, 2010 at 12:22 AM, Greg 'groggy' Lehey 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.