[TUHS] Dave Cutler (was Re: Re: Happy birthday, Dick Hustvedt!)

[imp@bsdimp.com (Warner Losh)]

On Wed, Feb 21, 2018 at 1:18 PM, Nemo <cym224 at gmail.com> wrote:

> On 20/02/2018, George Michaelson <ggm at algebras.org> wrote (in part):
> > I don't know if we used VMS C from Dec. I have a feeling if you ran
> > Eunice, you used pcc or a derivative of pcc. Cross library calling was
> > pretty straightforward (ok, so passing function addresses and dynamic
> > structures into FORTRAN not such) [...]
>
> Hhmmm... I recall using DEC's C compiler, which we called VAX C.
> Calling C stuff from VAX FORTRAN required jiggery-pokery and the other
> way was hopeless.  I recall (assuming no wetware bit-rot on my part)
> that DEC's languages did not pass on the stack but stuffed the
> arguments somewhere, passing a pointer to the somewhere.
>

The arguments were on the stack, but the calling convention also had some
metadata about the arguments you needed to worry about when calling
into/out of C, but rarely any time else. %DESCRIPTOR sticks in my head for
some traumatic reason.

Warner
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