Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!ucbvax!ucsd!orion.cf.uci.edu!oberon!pollux.usc.edu!kurtzman From: kurtzman@pollux.usc.edu (Stephen Kurtzman) Newsgroups: comp.sys.mac Subject: Re: New Mac Rumours Message-ID: <15564@oberon.USC.EDU> Date: 27 Feb 89 18:48:35 GMT References: <41a2364a.a590@mag.engin.umich.edu> <70755@ti-csl.csc.ti.com> <8513@polyslo.CalPoly.EDU> Sender: news@oberon.USC.EDU Reply-To: kurtzman@pollux.usc.edu (Stephen Kurtzman) Organization: University of Southern California, Los Angeles, CA Lines: 12 In article <8513@polyslo.CalPoly.EDU> dorourke@polyslo.CalPoly.EDU (David M. O'Rourke) writes: > I hope this helps. But if you look at processor design you can sometimes >see what language it was originally designed for by the instruction set >it has. Conversely, if you look at a language you can sometimes see for which processor it was designed. As noted by others, c was originally designed for the PDP-11. Because the PDP-11 has pre-decrement indirect, and post-increment indirect addressing modes, c has ++ and -- constructs to take advantage of the PDP-11 architecture. Likewise, the car and cdr of LISP have their analogues in the architecture of the machine on which LISP was first implemented. There are likely other examples, but I'll leave that to the language specialists.