[HECnet] Benchmarks - WHETSTONE.C

[Clem Cole]

On Tue, Jan 15, 2013 at 12:05 PM, Johnny Billquist <bqt at softjar.se> wrote:
Right. I'm sure that with enough work, you can always do it, but I'm curious on how much work. I have a feeling that compilers written in high level languages rapidly expand their requirements...


Its not that actually - IMHO.    You can always use overlays and thunks to write code that works on a small address machines, like the PDP-11.   I think the problem is that people that used / wanted the language did not need all of the features and frankly time moved on.   The languages themselves were just too heavy not the compiler per say - the compilers became heavy to support the language features people wanted.

If PL/M or PL/360 had not lost to C (BCPL et al), it might have been different in the case of PL/1.    If you note sub-set C compilers for the 8 and 16 bit machines exist or often exist as cross compilers from larger systems.

The issue is that 16-bits of data space is >>very<< limiting for a programmer, the code space can be swapped in and out with automatic or managed overlays - but data space is much harder to do.  

Clem