Infocom on PDP-11

[vrs]

From: "Allison" <ajp166 at bellatlantic.net>
> Decmate II/III uses 6120 (PDP-8 with EMA).  There is no *nix for the PDP-8
> and OS278 is common.  FYI: VMS runs on VAX(32bit) and Alpha(64bit).
>
> If you can fit the game format into a 32Kword 12bit machine it's possible.
> Generally speaking there isn't a C compiler for PDP-8 I know of and the
> 4k paged addressing and very minimalist instruction set would be an
> interesting challenge. I've seen Fortan, Focal, Basic and even algol
> on an 8 but never C.

I don't expect to ever see a true C compiler for the PDP-8.  The lack of
stacks, etc. are easily gotten around, but the 12 bit word size isn't.  On a
PDP-8, a short (or a pointer, for that matter) would have to be 2 words (and
a long would be 3).  The C data types just don't fit efficiently into 12 bit
words.  So writing a C compiler would be difficult, and the resulting code
would be horrible (at least by PDP-8 standards) :-).

Now a "C-like" language, with 12-bit shorts and ints, would be kinda cool.
(To generate efficient code, it would likely need to have something like
"near" and "far" pointers, though.)

    Vince