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I have no info, speculating: could it be to reuse the existing programmer's knowledge and code corpus when porting Unix from PDP-11 to x86 machines? This is as
by salicideblock 6y ago
I have no info, speculating: could it be to reuse the existing programmer's knowledge and code corpus when porting Unix from PDP-11 to x86 machines?
This is assuming that AT&T valued similarity with existing Unix assembly codebases more than it valued similarity with existing external x86 assembly codebases.
- skissane 6y agoMy speculation: they took their PDP-11 assembler and modified it to make an x86 assembler. Using a PDP-11-inspired syntax, instead of Intel syntax, reduced the number of code changes required.