From: Douglas McIlroy <douglas.mcilroy@dartmouth.edu>
To: TUHS main list <tuhs@tuhs.org>
Subject: [TUHS] Re: Does anybody know the etymology of the term "word" as in collection of bits?
Date: Sun, 11 Sep 2022 09:30:03 -0400 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <CAKH6PiVMydVmrU2iTpEuDwKqgemmdm22ope7kx2UNOCHswawPA@mail.gmail.com> (raw)
Anecdote prompted by the advent of Burroughs in this thread:
At the 1968 NATO conference on Software Engineering, the discussion
turned to language design strategies. I noted that the design of Algol
68, for example, presupposed a word-based machine, whereupon Burroughs
architect Bob Barton brought the house down with the remark, "In the
beginning was the Word, all right--but it was not a fixed number of
bits!"
[Algol 68's presupposition is visible in declarations like "long long
long ... int". An implementation need support only a limited number of
"longs", but each supported variety must have a definite maximum
value, which is returned by an "environment enquiry" function. For
amusement, consider the natural idea of implementing the longest
variety with bignums.]
Doug
next reply other threads:[~2022-09-11 13:31 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 26+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2022-09-11 13:30 Douglas McIlroy [this message]
2022-09-11 15:08 ` John Cowan
2022-09-11 15:30 ` Bakul Shah
2022-09-11 15:45 ` Paul Winalski
2022-09-11 16:20 ` Steve Nickolas
-- strict thread matches above, loose matches on Subject: below --
2022-09-09 19:39 Nelson H. F. Beebe
2022-09-09 20:27 ` Bakul Shah
2022-09-09 21:12 ` Henry Bent
2022-09-09 21:44 ` Dave Horsfall
2022-09-09 18:46 Norman Wilson
2022-09-10 1:35 ` Paul Winalski
2022-09-09 17:26 Douglas McIlroy
2022-09-09 1:33 Douglas McIlroy
2022-09-09 2:12 ` Larry McVoy
2022-09-13 14:23 ` John Foust via TUHS
2022-09-09 2:45 ` George Michaelson
2022-09-16 5:55 ` Marc Donner
2022-09-08 21:16 Noel Chiappa
2022-09-08 21:24 ` Dan Halbert
2022-09-08 18:20 Noel Chiappa
2022-09-08 19:28 ` Jim Capp
2022-09-08 16:51 [TUHS] " Jon Steinhart
2022-09-08 16:56 ` [TUHS] " Andrew Hume
2022-09-08 17:28 ` Dan Halbert
2022-09-09 0:00 ` Greg 'groggy' Lehey
2022-09-09 15:49 ` Paul Winalski
2022-09-09 18:44 ` Bakul Shah
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