[HECnet] Benchmarks - WHETSTONE.C

[Paul_Koning at Dell.com]

On Jan 15, 2013, at 8:59 AM, Clem Cole wrote:



On Mon, Jan 14, 2013 at 9:21 PM, Johnny Billquist <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 ;)

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...

Focal, Coral, Jovial (gag), Mumps.   Then from the outside world: Algol-60, Algol-68,...   

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.     

It would be interesting to see how GCC does with whetstone.c.

	paul