franco@MIKEY.BBN.COM (Frank A. Lonigro) (09/15/87)
Marge: When I was a senior in college (about 2.5 years ago) I ported the PDP-11 portable C compiler to a VAX 750. It produced the proper assembly code, but unfortunately the PDP assembler was written in PDP assembly(ARRGH)!! You can see my dilemma. I attempted to convert the assembler to VAX assembly but found the job to time consuming and too big. The project was abandoned in hopes that someday someone will write the PDP-11 assembler in C. Porting the Portable C compiler onto the VAX was farely easy. If I remember correctly, I had to define LINT in the compile line in order for it to compile. I don't know what version of PDP-11 UNIX you are running but the version we had at school at the time was 2.8BSD on a PDP-11/34 and the VAX was running 4.2BSD. If you have source code and there isn't any other way you can get the PDP compiler onto your VAX, i.e..buy it from someone, then I would say go for trying to port the code to your VAX, but if the assembler is written in PDP-11 assembly, your up a creek! One last note, if you try porting it yourself, make sure that the include files included by your application programs compiled as PDP-11, are the include files from the PDP, i.e.. stdio.h comes to mind(But you probably already knew that). good luck, -franco (U. of Massachusetts at Boston, 1985)