Re: technology discussion → does the world need a "new" C ?

On 06.07.2024 04:00, Keith Thompson wrote:

 
The PDP-10 had 36-bit words and could operate on bit fields of any size
from 1 to 36 bits.  A conforming PDP-10 C compiler might have
CHAR_BIT==9, for example.  But yes, it would be awkward to deal with
arrays of 6-bit quantities.

ISTR that the old CDCs 175/176 (with NOS) had 60 bit words and stored
6-bit based Pascal character strings (with array length 10) in a word.
Don't recall how it had handled other data types from other languages
or longer strings (if these were possible [in their Pascal dialect]).

Janis