3 ms·
I love these weird machines. I'll give an example of another. The Texas Instruments' C40 was a DSP made in the late 90's. It had 32-bit words, but inefficient
by jnwatson 5y ago
I love these weird machines. I'll give an example of another.
The Texas Instruments' C40 was a DSP made in the late 90's. It had 32-bit words, but inefficient byte manipulation. The compiler/ABI writer's solution was simple: make char 32 bits. So sizeof(char)==sizeof(short)==sizeof(int)==sizeof(long).
I remember writing routines for "packing" and "unpacking" native strings to byte strings and back.
- adonovan 5y agoI remember using that machine and wondering why my program used 4x the memory I expected. The hardware manual used the term "byte" in the old-fashioned way, to mean "minimum addressable unit": 32 bits. Today "byte" only ever means "octet".