[TUHS] Re: mental architecture models, Anyone ever heard of teaching a case study of Initial Unix?

[Aron Insinga <aki@insinga.com>]

Sorry if I'm mistaken, but I thought that we were talking about system 
implementation languages.  The languages discussed have their roots back 
in the early days of using an HLL instead of assembly language for this.

One could certainly write the kernel in a subset [or a superset of a 
subset] of the language that is used for everything else and I believe 
it has been done before.  (Is ESPOL a superset of Burroughs ALGOL?)  One 
could write the kernel in C and everything else in a *very* different 
language.

I only mentioned single-precision floating point as an example of 
BLISS-10 being operator-typed as opposed to data-typed, and then added 
that a little floating point is useful for writing run-time libraries.  
(For another example, a debugger might want to use floating point to 
allow examining or depositing such a value.)  I'd consider PDP-11 UNIX 
to be an operating system, and it included some libraries and a 
debugger.  I can see that others might consider PDP-11 UNIX to be a 
'distribution'.  Sorry if I wandered too far afield.

- Aron


On 7/8/24 22:40, Dave Horsfall wrote:
> On Mon, 8 Jul 2024, Adam Thornton wrote:
>
>> Indeed, S/390 Linux ran just fine on machines without IEEE floating
>> point.  Which meant that for years I had to jam `use integer` at the top
>> of any Perl I ran, because otherwise any Perl arithmetic at all would go
>> through the software float routines, which was very painful on little
>> machines, such as a P/390.
> When it comes down to it, why would a kernel need floating point?  Or are
> you talking about the distribution instead of the OS?
>
> -- Dave