bit patterns of all ones

[mouse at mcgill-vision.UUCP]

In article <408 at hadron.UUCP>, jsdy at hadron.UUCP (Joseph S. D. Yao) writes:
> On a ternary machine (what???) which some "solder-crazed EE" (was
> it?) might construct,

> Of course, lots of other things would break, too.  Divides by
> shifting, and even the meaning (to most folk) of shifting.

Could you even have C (as defined by K&R/H&S, or, alternatively, ANSI)
on such a machine?  Would you read "bit" to mean one of these ternary
digits (I won't abbreviate in a family newsgroup...:-) in things like
shifting and bitfields?  Does ANSI explicitly require binary
arithmetic?  I seem to recall reading a posting that talked about it
requiring "straight binary" representation for "unsigned int".

> Of course, that will never happen.  We will always have our binary,
> transistorised, 16- and 18-bit Neumann minicomputers.

Until they start building their own successors - after a while, we
won't know any more.  After a while longer, we may not be able to
understand any more.  Oh, sorry, this isn't net.sf-lovers :-?

					der Mouse

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