On Fri, Sep 20, 2019 at 7:08 PM Robert Clausecker <
fuz@fuz.su> wrote:
Greetings!
As a project for our university's seminar on the PDP-8 I wrote a
compiler for the B language targeting it.
Very cool.
It's a bit rough around
the edges and the runtime code needs some work (division and
remainder are missing), but it does compile B code correctly,
generating acceptable code (for my taste, though the function call
sequence could be better).
A suggestion, Load TSS/8 on to your simh system with its Algol compiler and look at how it generated code. I would suspect you can use Algol's calling conventions and probably some of its runtime. Google is your friend. I had it running a while back, but do not have it active at the moment - the key is all the pieces should be findable in the wild,.
I hope some of you enjoy this compiler for an important historical
language for an important historical computer (makes me wonder why
the two weren't married before).
Might have been, although when Ken created B for the PDP-7, BCPL was his model and there were already implementations of BCPL around for a number of processors. I would not be surprised if there was a BCPL/8. I would check in the DECUS library, much of which I think can be found online these days ??bit savers??.
FWIW: IIRC, the Grenoble Algol, a DEC Fortran and DEC Focal (plus assembler) were the languages I remember on TSS/8. I came late and short lived to the PDP-8 world and did not do much with it. So there could have been/unlikely were more. The 8 Gordon Bell and his students had used to write it, was in the EE Dept at the time and most unused because we hard started to collect PDP-11s.
But I do have a fondness for the TSS/8, because on a bet, one summer weekend in about 1976 I think, a couple of us hacked on it to make it swap to paper tape - you got about 2-4K of storage max (the read is destructive and much more than that the tape ripped/got tangled). But it worked enough we got the beers and pizza and we claimed success for proving it could be done. Sadly I have long ago lost that code for that hack. The PDP-8 we used was a very early 8 that CMU had and at one point was in donated to Boston Computer Museum/was on display until the museum closed.