[TUHS] Fwd: On the uniqueness of DMR's C compiler

Although “unique” was too strong a claim, I’m still looking into what drives my sense of the DMR C compiler being special for its time. The “Advent of Computing” podcast has an interesting episode on Bliss this month: https://open.spotify.com/episode/6q3XuPkcTPEa5GTP5i8EZb It (deliberately) doesn’t mention C all that much, but gives a nice view of another “systems language” of the early 70’s. Note that the podcast does not focus on the optimising aspect of the Bliss compiler; in my view this was an important aspect of both the Wulff and DMR compilers. For those interested in the topic, my work on the BCPL -> B -> Eh -> Zed lineage is steadily progressing: based on the surviving papers and theses I’ve reconstructed most of the Eh compiler: https://gitlab.com/pnru/Thoth As it stands it can compile Eh source to TI990 machine code, but the reconstruction is not finished (for example the library code is mostly missing). I hope to find time to finish this project in the next months. Doing a compare and contrast of BCPL, B, Bliss, C, Eh and Zed gives a nice context around the choices that DMR discusses in his paper on the development of early C. Note however that Eh/Zed is a journey: the Eh of 1975 was almost identical to the B that Johnson took there and it evolved from there. The quality of the compiler improved significantly in 1976/77. The evolution to a soft typed language (i.e. Zed) was the final step and only occurred around 1978/79. I remain interested in any bits of Toth source code that might have survived, as well as in contacting members of the Uni of Waterloo / Mike Malcolm portable computing project.