[HECnet] Benchmarks - WHETSTONE.C

[Johnny Billquist]

On 2013-01-15 14:59, Clem Cole wrote:


On Mon, Jan 14, 2013 at 9:21 PM, Johnny Billquist <bqt at softjar.se
<mailto:bqt at softjar.se>> wrote:


              If there's a PDP-11 PL/I compiler, join me in benchmarking using
              some PL/I examples I found on kednos.com <http://kednos.com> ;)


      Don't think I've ever seen one. I have F4, F77, Pascal, BASIC+2,
      COBOL, BCPL, Simula-2, Xlisp, TECO, Forth... Possibly some other
      things that I can't remember now...


Right -- Cutler did the original PL/1 compiler for the VAX only.   He
bought the front end from Frieberhouse (aka LPI aka Liant - aka
Ryan-Marfarland).   Since it was written in PL/1, Dave had to do the
development at MIT on Multics until it was good enough to could self
host on the VMS.   At the time, there was not market need for an PL/1 for
the 11 family and if my memory serves me, I think the development for
the 10's and 20s was going away.   PL/1 was IBM's big systems language
and they were trying to move their code base from FORTRAN and Cobol to it,

As for the PDP-11 C compiler generating poor code, that's because it did
not really have too as the feeling was that the Ritchie compiler for
UNIX was not that good either.   Any C compiler of the time was viewed as
just needed to work properly, self host and generate correct code.     For
the users of DEC OS, folks tended to write in FORTRAN or Macro on the
11s (or BLISS if you were DEC - but you need a 10 to cross compile).

[...]

The PDP-11 C compiler is a much later product than any of the stuff you talk about here. It's something DEC did in the 90s.

As far as I know, Cutler left the PDP-11 scene back in 1974 or so. And while there, he did kernel stuff. He was not involved in any compiler stuff back then as far as I know.

I've never seen the insides of a PL/1 compiler, but I bet it would take some work to get it to fit on a PDP-11... :-)

	Johnny