Couldn't it be faster?

Posted Mar 30, 2012 4:59 UTC (Fri) by eru (subscriber, #2753)
In reply to: Couldn't it be faster? by felixfix
Parent article: Grinberg: Linux on an 8-bit micro?

I'd guess roughly the same cycle time, but 36 bit words (PDP-6, -10)

Unix development was done mostly on PDP-11 series machines, which were 16-bit with 8-bit bytes. Force-fitting C to work those 36-bit architectures that were not byte-addressable was done much later, I believe. Probably the C language would have been very different, if Kernighan & Ritchie had been using the word-addressable CPU:s that were common in those days.

Couldn't it be faster?

Posted Apr 21, 2012 1:48 UTC (Sat) by ssavitzky (subscriber, #2855) [Link]

If you look at the PDP-11's instruction set and compare it to C's set of operators, you suddenly realize that C is really just a "structured assembler" for the PDP-11.

LISP and FORTRAN were based on the IBM 709.