[TynesideLUG] Your Computer is not a Fast PDP-11

[Alex Kavanagh]

On Sat, 6 Feb 2021 at 20:01, Jeff Joshua Rollin <jeff at jeffjoshua.club>
wrote:

> Hi,
>
> I mentioned during today's LUG having read a paper a few years ago which
> complained that modern C is still coded (and indeed the language was
> designed) to expose a virtual PDP-11 to the programmer. I didn't think I
> would find it again but, having Googled, I think I have. (If it's not
> the same one, it basically touches on the same points.)
>

I don't think it is as clear cut as to say "modern C is still coded ... to
expose a virtual PDP-11".  It *was* coded that way and inertia tends to
maintain the design pattern because, simultaneously, during the last 40-odd
years, processors have also been coded to a particular execution model to
get the best performance out of the dominant systems language: C.  So they
effectively seem to have locked each other into a vicious cycle of
maintaining the status quo.

It would have been interesting if the Transputer
<https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transputer> had made more of an impact, as
it begat the concurrent programming languages occam (and occam 2).  But the
ideas did end up in AMD/Intel in how to interlink CPUs and other chips
together.


> It's available online at https://queue.acm.org/detail.cfm?id=3212479 (no
> charge), and there is also a link to a PDF of the article on the same page.
>
> Hope this is of interest to someone,
>
> Jeff.
>
>
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-- 
Alex Kavanagh
Home: http://alex.kavanagh.name
@ajkavanagh