On 2025-03-13 6:01 p.m., Paul Koning via cctalk wrote:
An additional comment on that. To understand any field well, it is generally helpful,
and at times crucial, to have some knowledge of early work. I just read a translation of
some of the works of Galileo that makes that point in so many words in the introduction.
Similarly, while people don't build compilers today the way they did in 1960, it is still
valuable to read how Dijkstra and Zonneveld wrote the first ALGOL-60 compiler and, along
the way, had to invent many of the compiler construction techniques that were later
routinely taught and used in university compiler construction courses. There's an
outstanding analysis of that, in the Ph.D. thesis of Gauthier van den Hove. (It's not
yet a published document; I think that has something to do with copyright and publication
practices at some universities, perhaps Dutch or European conventions.) He subtitled his
thesis "New insights from old programs".
Hardware really defined what one could do, and that is often glossed
over in modern texts. You had multi-pass compilers because you had
so little real memory. Later when C and Pascal came out, they had
ample memory to run,and less primitive i/o thus deemed better and
quicker. Would one have had different languages had {} and [] been
around at the time and a full 32K of core? Hard drives designed for
more memory rather than having fast RPM so you can swap virtual memory
faster. You see 7 and 9 track drives with computers till the late
80's in movies and TV, yet very few books describe hardware interfacing.
Byte addressing is needed for C in general,and that makes a big
difference in computer languages and design. Data addressing went from
records to byte streams marking a whole new style of computing.
paul
Ben.
