Re: Beautifiul Mind: Thinking about Dijkstra

From: Frank Hamersley <terabitemightbe_at_bigpond.com>
Date: Sun, 30 Apr 2006 07:28:28 GMT
Message-ID: <wGZ4g.19486$vy1.11903_at_news-server.bigpond.net.au>


Tony D wrote:
> Ha ! I'll top that with a "Pascal Implementation: The P4 Compiler" two
> (slim) volume set - one of the source code to the Pascal P4 compiler
> and interpreter (written in Pascal, of course !) and the other a
> discussion of that source.
>
> I'm sure I remember a professor explaining that Pascal's text file
> handling was like *that* so that it was possible/easy to write Pascal
> compilers in Pascal, and that the first compiler for the CDC was
> compiled by printing out two sets of the source code, laying them on
> the floor side by side and manually running one with the other as input
> ....

I am trying to imagine this! I used to know the entire CDC instruction set including addressing modes by sight (there weren't that many of either) and I thought they would have prolly written a small bootstrap compiler in Assembler or Fortran IV to get going.

We did use Pascal first on a CDC Cyber 73 (FWICR) but by the time I got to the final undergrad year the prof had got Modula-II running on the PDP-11 (with cross compilation to the LSI-11) so our "Pascal" activities were curtailed.

Cheers, Frank. Received on Sun Apr 30 2006 - 09:28:28 CEST

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