OT: Language for the ages

[Paul Koning]

>>>>> "Chuck" == Chuck Guzis <cclist at sydex.com> writes:

 Chuck> On 10/14/2005 at 5:29 PM Paul Koning wrote:
 >> C is the obvious choice.  In either case, you have to be careful
 >> that you don't wreck the portability by using non-portable I/O.

 Chuck> Is it?  Given that we don't have 20-20 prescience, how about
 Chuck> 20-20 hindsight?  Could you implement C on any computer with
 Chuck> sufficient memory?

 Chuck> How about an IBM 1401, 1620 or 7080?  What would you do with
 Chuck> all of those nice operators such as <<, >>, &, |, and ^, given
 Chuck> that these were decimal machines?  OTOH, FORTRAN's been
 Chuck> implemented on all of these.

Good point.  I believe C needs to be implemented on a binary machine,
and anything other than two's complement is problematic (though, I
think, possible).  It also prefers byte addressable machines with
power of 2 word lengths, though that too can be worked around.  (There
is a GCC implementation for the DEC-10 -- though not as far as I know
for the CDC 6600.)

    paul