Re: What attributes of a programming language simplify its use?

From	anton@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at (Anton Ertl)
Newsgroups	comp.compilers
Subject	Re: What attributes of a programming language simplify its use?
Date	2022-12-07 10:14 +0000
Organization	Institut fuer Computersprachen, Technische Universitaet Wien
Message-ID	<22-12-009@comp.compilers> (permalink)
References	<22-12-001@comp.compilers> <22-12-003@comp.compilers> <22-12-004@comp.compilers> <22-12-007@comp.compilers> <22-12-008@comp.compilers>

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gah4 <gah4@u.washington.edu> writes:
>In the early days of 64 bit computing, which I mostly remember from
>the DEC Alpha, C compilers made long the 64 bit type.

The early days of 64-bit computing are on the CDC Star and Cray-1, but
C was a minor language for them.

Yes, we got the first mainstream 64-bit Unix with Digital OSF/1 on the
Alpha, and 64-bit APIs and ABIs on Unix had 64-bit long.

>That, then, broke too much software assuming long was 32 bits.

Obviously not, or other Unix vendors would not have also made longs
64-bit in their interfaces.

>So then we got long long as the (close enough to) reliable 64 bit
>type.

GCC introduced long long indepenently of any 64-bit port; this is easy
to see because the original GCC documentation specified that long long
int is twice as long as long int.  Later, when the Alpha port (and
later 64-bit ports) came, the porter decided to make long long 64-bit,
i.e., the same size as long; I don't know if the Alpha API/ABI had a
requirement on the size of long long, or if the people responsible for
the Alpha port did deviate from the documentation for some other
reason.  When we reported this as a bug, the fix was to change the
documentation to say that long long is twice as long as int.

Concerning IL32P64, i.e., 32-bit longs with 64-bit pointers, that
seems to be a specialty of 64-bit Windows.  Fortunately, I don't have
to deal with this API (64-bit Cygwin supports the Unix API, i.e.,
64-bit long).

>Maybe in a few years, we will have the long long long 128 bit type.

GCC has supported 128-bit integers for a while, originally we wrote,
e.g.:

typedef int int128_t __attribute__((__mode__(TI)));

(makes me wonder how the compiler sees the "TI"; it's not a keyword,
and it's not a defined name in any of the name spaces; gcc tends to
pass such things as literal strings (cf. extended asm), but here it
does not).

Nowadays it seems to (also) have __int128_t as an
implementation-specific keyword.  I see no motions in the direction of
long long long (and, looking at history, it would only have 64 bits in
length:-).

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

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What attributes of a programming language simplify its use? gah4 <gah4@u.washington.edu> - 2022-12-01 14:20 -0800
  Re: What attributes of a programming language simplify its use? gah4 <gah4@u.washington.edu> - 2022-12-02 02:09 -0800
  Re: What attributes of a programming language simplify its use? Thomas Koenig <tkoenig@netcologne.de> - 2022-12-03 10:25 +0000
    Re: What attributes of a programming language simplify its use? Hans-Peter Diettrich <DrDiettrich1@netscape.net> - 2022-12-03 22:16 +0100
      Re: What attributes of a programming language simplify its use? Keith Thompson <Keith.S.Thompson+u@gmail.com> - 2022-12-06 09:56 -0800
        Re: What attributes of a programming language simplify its use? gah4 <gah4@u.washington.edu> - 2022-12-06 12:43 -0800
          Re: What attributes of a programming language simplify its use? anton@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at (Anton Ertl) - 2022-12-07 10:14 +0000
        Re: What attributes of a programming language simplify its use? Hans-Peter Diettrich <DrDiettrich1@netscape.net> - 2022-12-07 12:13 +0100
          Re: What attributes of a programming language simplify its use? Keith Thompson <Keith.S.Thompson+u@gmail.com> - 2022-12-07 17:53 -0800
            Re: What attributes of a programming language simplify its use? Hans-Peter Diettrich <DrDiettrich1@netscape.net> - 2022-12-08 21:42 +0100
              Re: What attributes of a programming language simplify its use? gah4 <gah4@u.washington.edu> - 2022-12-08 14:44 -0800
                Re: C types, was What attributes of a programming language simplify its use? Hans-Peter Diettrich <DrDiettrich1@netscape.net> - 2022-12-09 15:01 +0100
              Re: C types, was What attributes of a programming language simplify its use? Keith Thompson <Keith.S.Thompson+u@gmail.com> - 2022-12-08 18:35 -0800
              Re: C types, was What attributes of a programming language simplify its use? David Brown <david.brown@hesbynett.no> - 2022-12-09 13:21 +0100
        Re: What attributes of a programming language simplify its use? gah4 <gah4@u.washington.edu> - 2022-12-12 00:00 -0800
      Re: C types, was What attributes of a programming language simplify its use? "marb...@yahoo.co.uk" <marblypup@yahoo.co.uk> - 2022-12-09 07:40 -0800
        Re: C types, was What attributes of a programming language simplify its use? anton@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at (Anton Ertl) - 2022-12-11 10:45 +0000
        Simple to implement and to use Christopher F Clark <christopher.f.clark@compiler-resources.com> - 2022-12-11 19:41 +0200
  Re: What attributes of a programming language simplify its use? Christopher F Clark <christopher.f.clark@compiler-resources.com> - 2022-12-03 23:33 +0000
    Re: What attributes of a programming language simplify its use? gah4 <gah4@u.washington.edu> - 2022-12-03 17:15 -0800

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