Language change and code breaks

[piet at cs.uu.nl]

>>>>> James Logajan <JamesL at Lugoj.Com> (JL) writes:

JL> Grant Edwards wrote:
>> And (at least in the Pascal compiler) identifiers were limited
>> to 6 characters so that an entire identifier would fit into a
>> single word -- so two identifiers could be compared in a single
>> instruction.

JL> I too fondly remember the CDC Cyber series. They didn't have a traditional
JL> stack. As I recall, a blank memory space was left at the beginning of each
JL> subroutine where a single return address could be stored. This meant you
JL> couldn't do recursion using the standard assembly language subroutine call
JL> mechanism. I forget how Pascal got around this. I do recall them switching
JL> from 6 bit characters to an optional 12 bit characters to support lowercase
JL> a few years after I encountered Kronos.

I wrote several parts of the CDC Cyber Algol 68 compiler (and later also an
Algol 60 compiler) and we just moved the address of the following
instruction to the stack (`manually') and then jumped to the procedure
address. And of course we used 12 bit characters and the language was
case-sensitive.
-- 
Piet van Oostrum <piet at cs.uu.nl>
URL: http://www.cs.uu.nl/~piet [PGP]
Private email: P.van.Oostrum at hccnet.nl