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History of compiler writing
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In computing, a compiler is a computer program (or set of programs) that transforms source code written in a computer language (the source language) into another computer language (the target language, often having a binary form known as object code). The most common reason for wanting to transform source code is to create an executable program.
Software for early computers was primarily written in assembly language. Higher level programming languages were not invented until the benefits of being able to reuse software on different kinds of CPUs started to become significantly greater than the cost of writing a compiler.
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Encyclopedia
In computing, a compiler is a computer program (or set of programs) that transforms source code written in a computer language (the source language) into another computer language (the target language, often having a binary form known as object code). The most common reason for wanting to transform source code is to create an executable program.
Software for early computers was primarily written in assembly language. Higher level programming languages were not invented until the benefits of being able to reuse software on different kinds of CPUs started to become significantly greater than the cost of writing a compiler. The very limited memory capacity of early computers also created many technical problems when implementing a compiler.
Towards the end of the 1950s, machine-independent programming languages were first proposed. Subsequently, several experimental compilers were developed. The first compiler was written by Grace Hopper, in 1952, for the A-0 programming language. The FORTRAN team led by John Backus at IBM is generally credited as having introduced the first complete compiler, in 1957. COBOL was an early language to be compiled on multiple architectures, in 1960.
In many application domains the idea of using a higher level language quickly caught on. Because of the expanding functionality supported by newer programming languages and the increasing complexity of computer architectures, compilers have become more and more complex.
Early compilers were written in assembly language. The first self-hosting compiler — capable of compiling its own source code in a high-level language — was created for Lisp by Tim Hart and Mike Levin at MIT in 1962. Since the 1970s it has become common practice to implement a compiler in the language it compiles, although both Pascal and C have been popular choices for implementation language. Building a self-hosting compiler is a bootstrapping problem -- the first such compiler for a language must be compiled either by a compiler written in a different language, or (as in Hart and Levin's Lisp compiler) compiled by running the compiler in an interpreter.
Books
- Backus, John, et al., , Proceedings of the Western Joint Computer Conference, Los Angeles, California, February 1957. Describes the design and implementation of the first FORTRAN compiler by the IBM team.
- Bauer, Friedrich L.; Eickel, Jürgen (Eds.), Compiler Construction, An Advanced Course, 2nd ed. Lecture Notes in Computer Science 21, Springer 1976, ISBN 3-540-07542-9
- Cheatham, T. E., and Sattley, K., Syntax directed compilation, SJCC p. 31. (1964).
- Cocke, John; Schwartz, Jacob T., Programming Languages and their Compilers: Preliminary Notes, Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences technical report, New York University, 1969.
- Conway, Melvin E., Design of a separable transition-diagram compiler, Communications of the ACM, Volume 6, Issue 7 (July 1963)
- Floyd, R. W., Syntactic analysis and operator precedence, Journal of the ACM, Vol. 10, p. 316. (July 1963).
- Gries, David, Compiler Construction for Digital Computers, New York : Wiley, 1971. ISBN 047132776X
- Irons, Edgar T., A syntax directed compiler for ALGOL 60, Communications of the ACM, Vol. 4, p. 51. (Jan. 1961)
- Knuth, D. E., On the translation of languages from left to right., Information and Control, Vol. 8, p. 607. (1965).
- Knuth, D. E., RUNCIBLE-algebraic translation on a limited computer, Communications of the ACM, Vol. 2, p. 18, (Nov. 1959).
- Randell, Brian; Russell, Lawford John, ALGOL 60 Implementation: The Translation and Use of ALGOL 60 Programs on a Computer, Academic Press, 1964
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