C compiler for pdp-11 under RSX

Chris Boylan boylan at dicomed.UUCP
Tue Jun 5 01:10:50 AEST 1984


I have to do a 1984 and unsay something.  In my original article
on the Whitesmith C compiler I mentioned a problem we had with
external declarations and compatiblity between pointers and arrays.
Simply hordes of people have been sending me mail telling me that
they aren't compatible and that I'm confused, some less politely
than others.

While I, and the person I worked with on the project, remember
testing the code involved we cannot remember the specific problem.
As we remember it, the code did work correctly on UNIX but generated
a garbage assignment on RSX using the Whitesmith compiler.  It is
unfortunate that that document I ~r'ed in was written after the
fact since the macro code was obvious correct for the pointer/array
question.

Since I cannot offer definitive proof that we weren't doing something
goofy, I will unsay what I said, if you follow what I mean.
Sorry for the confusion.

As to my contention that the Whitesmith C compiler was somewhat lacking
in optimization, it was clear from comparing the .s output that
it didn't do any significant amount of optimization.

If they used different csav/cret's for procedure calls we would
never have noticed it for the obvious reason.
-- 

	Chris Boylan
	{mgnetp | ihnp4 | uwvax}!dicomed!boylan



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