4 Dec
2018
4 Dec
'18
5:24 p.m.
On 4 Dec 2018, at 14:53, Clem Cole
<clemc(a)ccc.com> wrote:
On Tue, Dec 4, 2018 at 9:43 AM Noel Chiappa <jnc(a)mercury.lcs.mit.edu
<mailto:jnc@mercury.lcs.mit.edu>> wrote:
Which brings up an interesting query - I wonder when/what the last compiler written in
assembler was?
Excellent question -- IBM's Fortran-H maybe? circa mid 1970's would be my
guess.
ᐧ
The Fortran H compiler was mostly written in Fortran: 27,415 lines of Fortran and 16,721
lines of assembler according to slide 12 of [1].
There were some language extensions (structures and pointers) to support this, enabled by
the secret compiler option XL. They are described in Appendix J of the Program Logic
Manual for the compiler [2].
The early-1980s Fortran 77 compiler for the GEC 4090 was written in Babbage, a thin
PL/360-like veneer over the raw 4090 instruction set.
[1]
http://booksite.elsevier.com/9780120884780/Graduate_Lecture_Slides/Core_Lec…
[2] http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/ibm/360/fortran/Y28-6642-3_FortH_PLM_Nov68.pdf