[HECnet] Benchmarks - WHETSTONE.C

[Tim Sneddon]

On Tue, 15 Jan 2013 16:53:50 -0500
Clem Cole <clemc at ccc.com> wrote:



      [...snip...]

That said, by the time PL/1 came on the scene (late 1960s/early
1970s), it was pretty much de rigro that that a compiler was written
in it self to demonstrate the power of the language.     And the boot
strap compiler was one a one shot thing and tossed aside as soon as a
working compiler staggered to its feet (think Ken Thompson's Turing
Award lecture on security).   For instance BLISS was said to have been
boot strapped as a set of TECO macro's on the 10 - Eklund says he

According to Ron Brender the BLISS-10 compiler was originally 
written in a BLISS pseudo-code which has then hand-translated into
assembly, which then bootstrapped the compiler.

I do know that TECO macros were initially used to pre-process
BLISS-10 structure definitions and expand them.

does not remember, but he did tell me once that it might have been so
when I asked him [While I was there, I was not part of that thread -
where as Dave was one of Wulf's grad students at CMU when Bill
designed and implemented BLISS -- Eklund is still hacking on the
Intel FTN Compiler a few days a week BTW].

The Multics, Prime et al PL/1 were written in PL/1 (by Frieberghouse)
- which is why Culter went there to get the front end when he created
his company.   Again, I do not know how it was boot strapped.   It's
possible PL/1 for Multics was bootstrapped from GECOS and in
something like BCPL - anyone know?     Also, there were a number of
firms at the time in the Boston area doing compilers.

PL/I on Multics went through several iterations.   Before full PL/I
there was EPL, a cut down PL/I that was missing a lot of I/O features.