From: Bakul Shah <bakul@iitbombay.org>
To: Ken Thompson <kenbob@gmail.com>
Cc: TUHS main list <tuhs@minnie.tuhs.org>, Eugene Miya <eugene@soe.ucsc.edu>
Subject: Re: [TUHS] A New History of Modern Computing - my thoughts
Date: Sun, 28 Nov 2021 17:47:21 -0800 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <E4D6B279-07DD-40B5-84C4-432D1E75CABD@iitbombay.org> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <CAMP=X_kFzqPaZPHo9S-BrAgLuwKa9gvJpS1XavVc59XmAqGRUg@mail.gmail.com>
Was B, or rather BCPL, influenced by Algol68? It too had
<var> <op>:= <value>
as a shorthand for
<var> := <var> op <value>
Its declaration
<type> <name>
is the same as in C. Though in A68 this was a shorthand for
ref <type> <name> = loc <type>
> On Nov 28, 2021, at 1:31 PM, Ken Thompson <kenbob@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> The PDP-11 had very little the syntax of B expressions.
> All of that was in place in B long before the PDP-11.
> To be honest, the byte addressing of the 11 was a
> significant hindrance. It was the genius of Dennis
> that was able to conquer the 11 as he installed types
> into the language.
>
> So, my opinion, the PDP-11 had no design on the
> type system of C and moreover it was not even helpful.
>
> On Sun, Nov 28, 2021 at 1:17 PM Jon Steinhart <jon@fourwinds.com> wrote:
> Rob Pike writes:
> > Is there a symbiosis between C and the PDP-11 instruction set? The
> > machine was vital to C and Unix's success, but primarily due to the
> > availability of a department-sized machine. Was the instruction set a
> > significant component? Most Unix programmers wrote little to no
> > assembly, although perhaps more read what came out of the compiler.
> > But did it matter? Auto-increment and -decrement are often cited in
> > this story, but they are not that important, really, and were around
> > well before the PDP-11 made its appearance.
> >
> > I'm curious to hear arguments on either side.
> >
> > -rob
>
> Well, might just be my personal experience, but most of the machines
> that I had used before the 11 were classic accumulator architectures.
> I feel that the 11's pointer architecture combined with autoincrement
> and autodecrement was an amazing fit for C. If I remember correctly,
> it was very cool to have *p++ = *q++ be a single instruction.
>
> BTW, one thing that I forgot in my earlier post is that I think that
> the book also omitted any mention of Creative Commons. The book did
> talk about the business of the web and such, and it's my opinion that
> CC was an an essential third prong. The machines were one, the software
> was another, the third was content and CC was a big enabler.
>
> Jon
next prev parent reply other threads:[~2021-11-29 1:50 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 29+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2021-11-28 20:26 Jon Steinhart
2021-11-28 21:07 ` Rob Pike
2021-11-28 21:15 ` Jon Steinhart
2021-11-28 21:31 ` Ken Thompson
2021-11-28 21:47 ` Jon Steinhart
2021-11-28 22:17 ` Rob Pike
2021-11-29 0:19 ` Clem Cole
2021-11-29 1:12 ` Larry McVoy
2021-11-29 2:23 ` Bakul Shah
2021-11-30 19:27 ` Ralph Corderoy
2021-12-01 8:46 ` Rich Morin
2021-12-01 12:28 ` Al Kossow
2021-11-30 3:18 ` Larry McVoy
2021-11-29 1:18 ` George Michaelson
2021-11-29 1:36 ` Bakul Shah
2021-11-29 1:47 ` Bakul Shah [this message]
2021-11-29 7:46 ` arnold
2021-11-29 7:52 ` arnold
2021-11-29 14:44 ` Larry McVoy
2021-11-29 12:11 ` Michael Kjörling
2021-11-28 21:23 ` Thomas Paulsen
2021-11-28 21:39 ` Steve Nickolas
2021-11-28 22:41 ` Ron Natalie
2021-11-28 21:40 ` Larry McVoy
2021-11-29 15:37 ` Phil Budne
2021-11-28 23:12 Noel Chiappa
2021-11-28 23:35 ` Adam Thornton
2021-11-29 1:53 ` John Cowan
2021-11-29 13:48 ` Dan Halbert
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