OT: Language for the ages

[Chuck Guzis]

On 10/19/2005 at 10:48 AM woodelf wrote:

>Strange -- my hardware is just like that ( When I get it finshed ) .  
>The PDP-10 has done that already.
>Oddly this homebrew I am working can't do real C, since now C is almost 
>allways 32 bit code and
>I've got only a whoopping 64kb of ram. :(    I think a 20 bit int is 
>also a nice size too and 10 bit bytes.

Shades of the CDC 6000!  The native character set was 6 bit "display code",
but when the time came to implement goodies like lower-case, the agony
started.  What to do? There were several proposals running around for the
60-bit word.  12-bit bytes; 10 bit-bit bytes; even 8-bit bytes (packed 7.5
to a word with references to something called a "snaque").  IIRC,
eventually, an escape-sequence scheme was worked out--0000 (octal) was
defined as an end-of-line; 00-anything else was defined as an extended
character.  I don't recall that anyone ever seriously suggested 7-bit
characters, but it would have made sense--8 to a word.

Cheers,
Chuck