Subj : Re: RP2350 and Pico 2 - things missing
To   : All
From : Lawrence D'Oliveiro
Date : Mon Sep 02 2024 04:01:49

On Sun, 1 Sep 2024 11:07:17 +0100, mm0fmf wrote:

> Or you were programming in C on an Analog Devices SHARC were char was 32
> bits.

I was watching a video clip the other day which talked about the Symbolics
3600 Lisp Machine from the 1980s. This one had core Lisp constructs like
garbage collection and arbitrary-precision integers programmed into its
microcode.

When they came to implement a C compiler, they didn’t bother defining
finite-precision integers for it: they just had it use the arbitrary-
precision ones, since they were already available in the machine
instruction set. The “sizeof” operator did return small, fixed values for
types, but for integers, they were essentially meaningless.

Somebody wrote a test program to determine how large an integer was, by
initializing a variable to 1 and left-shifting it until it overflowed and
went to zero.

The program ran for over an hour, exhausted all the available memory, and
crashed.

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