> I was implicitly referring to C compilers. Heck, Pascal had packed > data in the early 1970s, possibly even the late 1960s.
The first Pascal compiler became operational in 1970, on a CDC 6400. For those born after Nixon, the CDC 6000 series was a 60 bit word addressable machine. That explains the packed keyword. Implementing a recursive programing language on a machine that stores the return address of a procedure call in the first word of the procedure was a trick. The speed of the original Pascal compiler on the CDC machine wasn't that good. I used the compiler at the University of Georgia in the late 1970's. Software to talk to our packet network was written in it. The packed keyword is still in the Pascal spec, but was dropped in Modula-2, and Oberon.
