On Wed, 18 Feb 1998, John Wilson wrote:

> >From: Johnny Billquist <bqt@Update.UU.SE>
> [...]
> >Interesting... Unless my memory totally fails me, the VAX very much works
> >the same way as the PDP-11, on which  you really had to get explicit to
> >avoid getting PIC code. So, either gcc is more than just a little stupid,
> >or some strange solutions have been used...
> 
> I forget, does the VAX have a "load address" instruction?  Lack of this
> instruction is the most painful thing about doing PIC on a PDP-11, and since
> it's not at all unusual to handle pointers to functions or to global data
> structures in C, this will bite you a lot (since you need to do math with
> the PC every time you build a pointer, which could normally be loaded an
> immediate value of the absolute address).  Pointers to data structures on
> the stack would have to be computed anyway so that shouldn't be a problem...

Yes, the VAX does. And I agree, that was a small pain on the PDP-11.
Not that bad, but it was a little hazzle.

	Johnny

Johnny Billquist                  || "I'm on a bus
                                  ||  on a psychedelic trip
email: bqt@update.uu.se           ||  Reading murder books
pdp is alive!                     ||  tryin' to stay hip" - B. Idol