Re: Which target language do I choose?

Toon Moene <toon@moene.indiv.nluug.nl> wrote:
>> (There are C compilers for many machines that are too small to have
>> floating-point hardware, but not FORTRAN compilers.)
>
>I wouldn't be too sure about this... [FORTRAN on PalmPilot]
>Now, perhaps the PalmPilot *has* floating point support - I don't know - but
>you can't argue with the fact that it's a small machine :-)


The PalmPilot is *physically* small, but there's actually quite a bit of
hardware crammed into there. The first Unix FORTRAN compilers were
written on machines with slower CPUs and less memory than the PalmPilot.
If memory serves, the CPU inside a PalmPilot is a 68000, so there's no FP
hardware. But it's the same basic CPU architecture that was used in a lot
of larger systems, many of which do/did have FP hardware.


There are C compilers for Microchip's PIC line of microcontrollers, and
for similarly minute machines -- small in capabilities, not just in
physical size.
--
Henry Spencer henry@spsystems.net
(aka henry@zoo.toronto.edu)
[Quite true. I used to run useful Fortran programs on an IBM 1130 with
8K bytes of RAM, a 1.2MB hard disk, and no real floating point. I wrote
INfort, an early Fortran 77, on a PDP-11 with a 64K user address space.
Worked fine. -John]
--

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