> I certainly understand the design of the language used to expose a PDP-11 in a portable way.
It depends on what you mean by that. The PDP-11's dialect of B's major changes were more ergonomic handling of strings to no longer required repacking cells, and pointers became byte-aligned rather than word-aligned. C adopted these changes from the PDP-11 dialect of B, but that's the extent of influence the PDP-11 ever had.[1] The compiler size restrictions imposed by the PDP-7 and the GE-635 are far more influential on the semanticalities of the family.
In this rhetoric, what I'll call the "Your computer is not a fast PDP-11" dialogue, I find that people will imply things like pointer arithmetic, granular availability of memory as a flat array, etc. were invented in 1973, as though these are special quirks of the PDP-11 that C thrusted upon the programmer. They're just a normal part of computing, really. All the same criticisms leveraged at C can be leveraged at Forth for example, which isn't even in this class of register machine.
> Intel failures tend to be more political than technical
In the case of Itanium and iAPX432? Absolutely not. Read through the manual of the latter for a lark[2], there was never any chance in hell this thing could have succeeded. You couldn't pay me to maintain code for such a machine, sufficiently smart compiler or not. Itanium was a repeat of the same blunder, only this time Intel didn't even try to base their design on any existing infrastructure.
It depends on what you mean by that. The PDP-11's dialect of B's major changes were more ergonomic handling of strings to no longer required repacking cells, and pointers became byte-aligned rather than word-aligned. C adopted these changes from the PDP-11 dialect of B, but that's the extent of influence the PDP-11 ever had.[1] The compiler size restrictions imposed by the PDP-7 and the GE-635 are far more influential on the semanticalities of the family.
In this rhetoric, what I'll call the "Your computer is not a fast PDP-11" dialogue, I find that people will imply things like pointer arithmetic, granular availability of memory as a flat array, etc. were invented in 1973, as though these are special quirks of the PDP-11 that C thrusted upon the programmer. They're just a normal part of computing, really. All the same criticisms leveraged at C can be leveraged at Forth for example, which isn't even in this class of register machine.
> Intel failures tend to be more political than technical
In the case of Itanium and iAPX432? Absolutely not. Read through the manual of the latter for a lark[2], there was never any chance in hell this thing could have succeeded. You couldn't pay me to maintain code for such a machine, sufficiently smart compiler or not. Itanium was a repeat of the same blunder, only this time Intel didn't even try to base their design on any existing infrastructure.
[1] - https://web.archive.org/web/20150611114355/https://www.bell-...
[2] - http://www.bitsavers.org/components/intel/iAPX_432/171860-00...