[Info-vax] Dave Cutler, Prism, DEC, Microsoft, etc.

[John Reagan]

"Bob Koehler" <koehler at eisner.nospam.encompasserve.org> wrote in message 
news:mESFRhh8PZhX at eisner.encompasserve.org...
> In article <TIGdnaZfkYIdcI7WnZ2dnUVZ_qSdnZ2d at earthlink.com>, "John Reagan" 
> <johnrreagan at earthlink.net> writes:
>>
>> Pascal has 64-bit pointer support (I added limited support back in 1998 
>> with
>> much more complete support in the early 2000s).  COBOL has USAGE IS
>> POINTER64.  BASIC doesn't have much pointer typing to begin with.  Don't
>> know about Ada right off hand.
>
>   Like Fortran-77, you don't need pointers in your code to need a
>   compiler which is pointer size aware.
>
>   For instance, the TOPS-20 Fortran-77 compiler would generate
>   different opcodes and allocate different space for pass by address
>   arguments when compiled in 18 bit or 23 bit addressing mode.  I
>   suspect the Alpha Fortran-9x and C compilers can make use of 64 bit
>   addressing, even if you don't declare a single pointer in your code,
>   if you compile with the appropriate qualifiers.
>

Argument slots (per the Calling Standard) are 64-bits wide period. 
Addresses passed as arguments are sign-extended to 64-bits.  The called 
routines depend on that since system-space addresses rely on that.

John