Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!rutgers!cmcl2!brl-adm!umd5!uvaarpa!virginia!babbage!mac3n From: mac3n@babbage.acc.virginia.edu (Alex Colvin) Newsgroups: comp.arch Subject: Re: C machine Message-ID: <133@babbage.acc.virginia.edu> Date: 16 Dec 87 19:50:05 GMT References: <7535@alice.UUCP> Organization: University of Virginia Lines: 19 Autoincrement & decrement are probably in C for the same reason they are in the 11 (& 10 & 8 & GE635 &c.). They're useful. I find myself beating on iNtel instructions these days, and have noticed several things not amenable to C. several widths of registers. this means that the implicit widening of char to int actually generates code. ditto float to double. nonlinear addressing. this means that arithmetic on pointers is dangerous. particularly equality. however, most reasonable uses work OK. On the DPS8 (descendant of GE635) I note that C also assumes byte addressability and not bit addressability. You'll see this on most new designs. Finally, I like to think of C as the apotheosis of Algol 68.