@p

> >They tended to write huge masses of code

> Huge and indecypherable, no doubt.

I left that bit implied, and you caught it. Perhaps not to them, but to me at least.

>You are correct. Register allocation has gotten smarter, that's one nice thing. gcc and Ken's cc both usually ignore the register keyword. Ken's, in fact, just puts everything in registers, and then kicks your program back to you if it can't find enough registers for your intermediate values on the target arch. You usually don't see this error unless you are doing some absurd multi-line expression; I've never run into it except when doing bytebeat songs (where the traditional form is one long, single expression).

Bytebeat sounds conceptually interesting, but perhaps as part of my 'Back to 1825' mindset I mostly listen to Classical these days, so probably wouldn't like it.