How to do it ?

[Michel DENIS, European Engineering, Valbonne]

I would like to know if someone has used (or heard about the use of) high level
languages (C, Pascal, Ada, ..) or tools to generate PDP-11 code.

I think there could be various ways to do it, including :

- a cross-compiler running on VAX/VMS or PDP/RSX which generates PDP-11 code
- a pre-processor (like Whitesmith C) which generates MACRO-11 sources to be
assembled using the MACRO-11 assembler.

I am very interested to know about such possible Compiler/Tool that you
could have (of course a compiler with a run-time library would not work in
this case because the "system" is some specialized processor based on a
PDP-11 chip).

A lot of thanks in advance to all of you.

Michel M. DENIS.

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[Henry Spencer]

> I would like to know if someone has used (or heard about the use of) high
> level languages (C, Pascal, Ada, ..) or tools to generate PDP-11 code.
> I think there could be various ways to do it, including :

> - a cross-compiler running on VAX/VMS or PDP/RSX ...

Have you considered a native compiler running on PDP11 Unix? Since that's
what my system is, and how all C on it is compiled, I can guarantee it
works. It's a much more pleasant working environment than VMS or RSX, too...

If you don't want to buy a Unix-capable PDP11 just for this job (an attitude
I can understand, since in other respects it's not a good choice for a Unix
machine any more), I believe the compiler and such should run without much
trouble in compatibility mode under 4BSD. The compiler might run in native
mode, in fact, although I would wonder about 16-bit assumptions it might
make. The assembler was written in assembler, so unless you can find a
more modern version (I know of one, but it's not widely available), you
will need compatibility mode for that.

> ...of course a compiler with a run-time library would not work in

> this case because the "system" is some specialized processor based on a

> PDP-11 chip...

We used to routinely compile code to be downloaded to a smaller, non-Unix,
PDP11. This required a different C library (or great care in using the
standard one) plus a different runtime-startup routine, but it worked fine.
--
Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology
{allegra,ihnp4,decvax,pyramid}!utzoo!henry