Path: ...!weretis.net!feeder9.news.weretis.net!i2pn.org!i2pn2.org!.POSTED!not-for-mail
From: mitchalsup@aol.com (MitchAlsup1)
Newsgroups: comp.arch
Subject: Re: PDP-10 addressing, was The Design of Design
Date: Sat, 27 Apr 2024 17:50:03 +0000
Organization: Rocksolid Light
Message-ID: <e38e7e704c5638575fa28d09b96df399@www.novabbs.org>
References: <v03uh5$gbd5$1@dont-email.me> <v0fln1$3iapn$1@dont-email.me> <v0gsbj$2cok$1@gal.iecc.com> <v0imun$b6s2$1@dont-email.me> <v0j9ln$20tn$1@gal.iecc.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8; format=flowed
Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit
Injection-Info: i2pn2.org;
	logging-data="2548993"; mail-complaints-to="usenet@i2pn2.org";
	posting-account="65wTazMNTleAJDh/pRqmKE7ADni/0wesT78+pyiDW8A";
User-Agent: Rocksolid Light
X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 4.0.0
X-Rslight-Site: $2y$10$ApHTUJT0y/rgkukkplqU/uUtgNTXajmK2ijLQ1HINMPwSm91iOS1K
X-Rslight-Posting-User: ac58ceb75ea22753186dae54d967fed894c3dce8
Bytes: 2391
Lines: 29

John Levine wrote:

> According to Thomas Koenig  <tkoenig@netcologne.de>:
>>> While this wasn't terribly hard, it did mean that any time you wanted
>>> to change a program to run in extended mode you had to look at all the
>>> code and check every instruction that did an address calculation,
>>> which was tedious.
>>
>>Hmm... would a simple recompilation have done the trick, or were there
>>also issues with integers being restricted to 18 bits, for example?

> This was 50 years ago. The system software was mostly written in
> assembler. Some was written in BLISS which was more concise but still
> extremely machine specific. 

BLISS reads a LOT like the original K&R C.

>                             I suppose you could recompile your Fortran
> programs, but the Fortran compiler was written in BLISS.

> There were later versions of BLISS for the PDP=11, Vax and other
> machines but they were not compatible with each other. 

Imagine if BLISS were machine independent ?!!

>                                                        The earliest
> places I can think of system programming languages with different
> targets were when Bell Labs ported Unix to the Interdata, and the IBM
> S/38 and its successors that had (still has) a virtual machine
> language that is translated to whatever hardware it's running on.