21 Sep
2017
21 Sep
'17
12:40 a.m.
Warner Losh <imp(a)bsdimp.com> kindly corrected my statement that kcc
compiler on the PDP-10 was done by Ken Harrenstien, pointing out that
it was actually begun by Kok Chen (whence, the name kcc).
I've just dug into the source tree for the compiler, and found this
leading paragraph in kcc5.vmshelp (filesystem date of 3-Sep-1988) that
provides proper credits:
> ...
> KCC is a compiler for the C language on the PDP-10. It was
> originally begun by Kok Chen of Stanford University around 1981 (hence
> the name "KCC"), improved by a number of people at Stanford and Columbia
> (primarily David Eppstein, KRONJ), and then adopted by Ken Harrenstien
> and Ian Macky of SRI International as the starting point for what is now
> a complete and supported implementation of C. KCC implements C as
> described by the following references:
>
> H&S: Harbison and Steele, "C: A Reference Manual",
> HS1: (1st edition) Prentice-Hall, 1984, ISBN 0-13-110008-4
> HS2: (2nd edition) Prentice-Hall, 1987, ISBN 0-13-109802-0
> K&R: Kernighan and Ritchie, "The C Programming Language",
> Prentice-Hall, 1978, ISBN 0-13-110163-3
>
> Currently KCC is only supported for TOPS-20, although there is
> no reason it cannot be used for other PDP-10 systems or processors.
> The remaining discussion assumes you are on a TOPS-20 system.
> ...
I met Ken only once, in his office at SRI, but back in our TOPS-20
days, we had several e-mail contacts.
----------------------------------------
P.S. In these days of multi-million line compilers, it is interesting
to inspect the kcc source code line count:
% find . -name '*.[ch]' | xargs cat | wc -l
80298
A similar check on a 10-Oct-2016 snapshot of the actively-maintained
pcc compiler for Unix systems found 155896 lines.
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