[HECnet] Benchmarks - WHETSTONE.C

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.