Re: [PATCH 00/14] alpha: cleanups for 6.10

[Maciej W. Rozycki]

On Mon, 1 Jul 2024, Linus Torvalds wrote:

> The architecture was wrong 30 years ago. It's not that it "became"
> wrong in hindsight. It was wrong originally, and it's just that people
> hadn't thought things through enough to realize how wrong it was.
> 
> The only way it's not wrong is if you say "byte accesses do not
> matter". That's a very Cray way of looking at things - Cray 1 had a
> 64-bit "char" in C, because there were no byte accesses.
> 
> That's fine if your only goal in life is to do HPC.
> 
> So if you simply don't care about bytes, and you *only* work with
> words and quad-words, then alpha looks ok.
> 
> But honestly, that's basically saying "in a different universe, alpha
> is not a mis-design".

 Precisely my point!  We got so used to think in multiples of 8 bits that 
other approaches seem ridiculous.

 The PDP-10 operated on 36-bit quantities and strings were essentially 
clusters of 6-bit characters packed into 6-packs (which is also allegedly 
where the C language's original limitation of using at most six characters 
for identifiers came from -- so that the PDP-10 could compare a pair with 
a single machine instruction).

 So there was already legacy of doing things this way at DEC back in ~1990 
and I can envisage engineers there actually thought that to have a machine 
that in C terms has 32-bit shorts and ints, 64-bit longs and pointers, and 
strings as clusters of 8-bit characters packed into 4-packs or 8-packs was 
not at all unreasonable.  Or maybe just plain 32-bit characters.  After 
all you don't absolutely *have* to use data types of 8 or 16 bits exactly 
in width for anything, do you?  NB for strings nowadays we have Unicode 
and we could just use UTF-32 if not to waste memory.

 And even now ISO C is very flexible on data type widths and only requires 
the character data type to be at least 8 bits wide, and 16-bit and 24-bit 
examples are actually given in the standard itself.  Yes, POSIX requires 
the character data type to be 8 bits wide exactly now, but POSIX.1-1988 
deferred to ANSI C AFAICT.

  Maciej