[HECnet] Benchmarks - WHETSTONE.C

On 2013-01-16 21:17, Steve Davidson wrote: The PDP-11 "C" compiler was a buyout. It started life out as a PASCAL compiler. The first project leader (J. Bishop) works for Intel - on the West Coast. I believe that to be incorrect. I had to search through my archives of stuff, to check, as it didn't match my hazy memories. The project leader for the DEC PDP-11 C compiler was Thomas Krupinski, and he was the project leader all the way from the beginning to the end. And it was never a PASCAL compiler, nor did it start outside of DEC. Here is excerpts from a conversation I had with him a number of years ago: *** I suspect you are referring to Digital's PDP-11 C. A couple years before this project was begun, an engineer was tasked with investigating if it would be feasable to "productize" DECUS C. The engineer concluded it wasn't. PDP-11 C is written mostly in C, with a very small amount of code written in MACRO-11. The compiler compiles itself for the RT-11, RSX and RSTS/E versions, and is compiled by VAXC (PDP-11C preceeded DEC C) for a cross compiler running on VMS and producing PDP-11 code. The compiler will produce either .obj files or MACRO-11 (or both). The latter was useful when a member of the RSTS/E group implemented a CUSP in PDP-11 C while it was still in beta - Management wouldn't let him release it since it was compiled with an unreleased product (strange, that never stopped folks from releasing code written using the BLISS-11 compiler), so he simply compiled it to MACRO-11, and checked that in, since MACRO-11 was supported... I can confirm that PDP-11 C did not bootstrap using DECUS C. Tom Krupinski Project leader for PDP-11 C V1.0, V1.1, V1.2 (And the engineer who did the DECUS C investigation) *** I have not talked with him in ages now... Johnny -- Johnny Billquist || "I'm on a bus || on a psychedelic trip email: bqt at softjar.se || Reading murder books pdp is alive! || tryin' to stay hip" - B. Idol