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Re: Is MIX utterly silly?

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On Saturday, August 24, 2019 at 2:53:42 PM UTC-5, Peter Percival wrote:
> Louis Valence wrote:
[Knuth:]
> > 
> >      One of the principal goals of my books is to show how high-level
> >      constructions are actually implemented in machines, not simply to
> >      show how they are applied. I explain coroutine linkage, tree
> >      structures, random number generation, high-precision arithmetic,
> >      radix conversion, packing of data, combinatorial searching,
> >      recursion, etc., from the ground up.  The programs needed in my
> >      books are generally so short that their main points can be grasped
> >      easily.  People who are more than casually interested in computers
> >      should have at least some idea of what the underlying hardware is
> >      like.
> 
> I agree!  But no computer is or was like MIX.
> 

Yes, there most certainly were. Even weird stuff like saving the return
address in the subroutine's 'return' instruction, this was done on the
PDP-1. A good source for the wide diversity of 60s and 70s computers
is Bell and Howell, Computer Structures. 

MIX is of course a "mix" of features from various old machines, so
it isn't exactly like any of them. But every weird thing it does is
a reflection of some actual hardware that really did exist.

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Is MIX utterly silly? Peter Percival <peterxpercival@hotmail.com> - 2019-08-19 22:52 +0100
  Re: Is MIX utterly silly? Robert Wessel <robertwessel2@yahoo.com> - 2019-08-19 21:14 -0500
    Re: Is MIX utterly silly? Peter Percival <peterxpercival@hotmail.com> - 2019-08-20 13:15 +0100
      Re: Is MIX utterly silly? David Brown <david.brown@hesbynett.no> - 2019-08-20 14:49 +0200
        Re: Is MIX utterly silly? "Alf P. Steinbach" <alf.p.steinbach+usenet@gmail.com> - 2019-08-21 07:35 +0200
          Re: Is MIX utterly silly? David Brown <david.brown@hesbynett.no> - 2019-08-21 14:08 +0200
            Re: Is MIX utterly silly? "Alf P. Steinbach" <alf.p.steinbach+usenet@gmail.com> - 2019-08-21 17:10 +0200
              Re: Is MIX utterly silly? David Brown <david.brown@hesbynett.no> - 2019-08-22 15:11 +0200
          Re: Is MIX utterly silly? Louis Valence <lvalence@example.com> - 2019-08-23 17:13 -0300
            Re: Is MIX utterly silly? Peter Percival <peterxpercival@hotmail.com> - 2019-08-24 20:53 +0100
              Re: Is MIX utterly silly? luser droog <mijoryx@yahoo.com> - 2019-09-08 12:50 -0700
      Re: Is MIX utterly silly? Louis Valence <lvalence@example.com> - 2019-08-23 17:01 -0300

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