Re: Fat references

glen herrmannsfeldt <gah@ugcs.caltech.edu> writes:
>In comp.compilers Anton Ertl <anton@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at> wrote:
>> Yes, 16 bits were called a word on such 8-bit processors (there was
>> another name for 8-bit units: byte), and it was commonly needed,
>> because these machines used 16 bits for addressing their 64KB address
>> space.
>
>But not quadword and octoword.


Sure, but once they had used "word" for 16 bits, they apparently had
no fantasy left for names of larger units (hmm: phrase, sentence,
paragraph; at least "line" and "page" are used:-).


>> But it also was marketed as a successor to the PDP-11, with various
>> compatibility features. And apparently it's important to keep "word"
>> the same size when doing such successions, and so 16 bits are still
>> called a word even in the Alpha architecture.
>
>It is also important to show the technology advances. VAX was
>supposed to be DEC's entry to the 32 bit world. Keeping the word size
>at 16 bits dilutes the effect.


It's just a name. I would prefer to use the natural word size for
"word" (i.e., 64 bits on Alpha and AMD64). But I guess there are
groups of people who reuse stuff from the smaller machines on the
bigger ones, and if the width of a "word" changed between the
architectures, interpreting documentation for such things would become
confusing ("Does this documentation mean a PDP-11 word, a VAX word, or
an Alpha word in this place?"), so every manufacturer decided to avoid
changing the number of bits in a "word" even if that meant that a
"word" was smaller than a natural machine word.


>I do remember that in early Alpha C compilers a C (long) was 64 bits,
>but later changed to 32 bits with (long long) as the 64 bit type.


C's long int type is 64-bits on Alpha (and other 64-bit architectures)
on Unix, and AFAIK 32-bits on Windows (even 64-bit Windows), with
64-bit long long int on both. I don't think you get Windows for Alpha
anymore.


- anton
--
M. Anton Ertl
anton@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at
http://www.complang.tuwien.ac.at/anton/

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