henry@zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer) (12/03/90)
Remember the discussions about how the 8086 was "source compatible" with the 8080? Well, Motorola is following in Intel's wake: its new 68HC16, the 16-bit successor to its 8-bit line of microcontrollers, is "source code compatible" with its predecessors. I wonder if they got the parity bit right. :-) -- "The average pointer, statistically, |Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology points somewhere in X." -Hugh Redelmeier| henry@zoo.toronto.edu utzoo!henry
caveh@csl.sri.com (Caveh Jalali) (12/04/90)
In article <1990Dec3.055824.18403@zoo.toronto.edu> henry@zoo.toronto.edu (Henry Spencer) writes: >Remember the discussions about how the 8086 was "source compatible" with >the 8080? Well, Motorola is following in Intel's wake: its new 68HC16, >the 16-bit successor to its 8-bit line of microcontrollers, is "source >code compatible" with its predecessors. > it's my impression (not having been there way back when) is that "source code compatibility" was a big deal in the late 70s: the 6809 was the first processor i got involved with (in more ways than one) and i remember reading the 6809 manuals -- they kept saying that the 6809 was SOURCE CODE COMPATIBLE with the 6800, and went thru all sorts of verbage to explain the reasons. i guess good ol' batwings is replaying that song one more time! these days we just talk about ANSI C and SVID instead. -- 00c -- caveh@csl.sri.com "X is not a letter, it's a sentence."