🚀 go-pugleaf

In article <8811031232.AA03013@merlin.cs.purdue.edu> comer@purdue.edu (Douglas Comer) writes:
>  >>	     followed by an "r 20" on the line immediately below it....
>
>That's an assembler error messages (no kidding, that's what the original UNIX
>C compiler used -- really short, cryptic messages)...

Actually, the *compiler* did a fair-to-middling job on error messages.
The *assembler*, however, was a different story, at least partly because
it was very old -- much older than the compiler -- and had to be able
to run on really small machines.  The first PDP11 Unix ran on an 11/20
with 24KB of physical memory and no MMU (meaning that both the kernel
and the biggest user process had to fit in physical memory), which
meant that the assembler had to run in 8KB or so.  Every byte counted.
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