[HECnet] Trying to build SIMH from git (on OpenIndiana)

Cory Smelosky b4 at gewt.net
Wed Mar 20 11:02:35 PDT 2013


On 20 Mar 2013, at 13:53, "Clem Cole" <clemc at ccc.com> wrote:
Cory
On Tue, Mar 19, 2013 at 5:08 PM, Cory Smelosky <b4 at gewt.net> wrote:
I'm used to either Unices that don't differentiate that way, or predate C++. ;)

I really don't think it could pre-date C++ as the cc vs CC convention was Bjarne's, he's the author he got to create the convention!    Since all of the early UNIX flavors of C++ were based on his compiler, they all followed it.     His original "compiler" was a pre-processor   (i.e. C++ to C translator) for the Ritchie and later Johnson C Compiler and for a very long time, C++ was just sold to people as a better C since it called C under the covers. [I once had the sources, but that stuff is long off line.   I do still have a copy of his original "C with Classes" paper with an official bell labs cover - that paper actually predates C++ ;-)

Ahhhh. ;)


It's also why the original suffix for C++ was a the capital letter C, not c++ or cpp as we often see today.

I forgot about that! Huh.


IIRC Masscomp was the first to realized we needed to integrate it into the other dev tools, I remember debugging C++ source  code being tedious  with Masscomp's version of Mark Linton's dbx debugger (dbx was the godfather to gdb).    Being ex-DEC (ex-VMS, RT11, and RSX), the compiler guys knew it compete we had to have our own compiler (Sun was late into the compiler biz - about 2-3 yrs after Masscomp BTW).

What happened to Masscomp?


Since we had started with Bjarne's pre-processor for C++, when they did a new formal front-end for the compiler DEC style, Masscomp just replaced the CC preprocessor stuff, with a call to then new compiler, be the name was keep to not break customer's makefiles.   Most other UNIX vendors, like Sun would follow suite.

That's a smart decision to keep the convention.   Some vendors wouldn't have done that. ;)


The g++ convention came from rms and the gnu guys, who always tended to so things there own way.   Plus Redmond did their own thing as they always do, plus they had to deal with the case folding silliness which they took as a feature not a bug caused by the ASR33 in the old days..    Since in the end, GNU and Redmond created more C++ programmers, there conventions stuck.

The original convention wouldn't work too well on case-insentive filesystems like HFS+ in a default OS X install. ;)



Clem
  



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