10 Mar
2023
10 Mar
'23
11:54 p.m.
On 3/10/23, Clem Cole <clemc(a)ccc.com> wrote:
Arnold's observation about trying to be small is reasonable,
although contemporaries like BLISS did have support. So the comparison
should really be to BCPL, PL/360, BLISS, *et al*. for features/size
[although Wulf cheated, the BLISS-11 compiler was not self-hosting and
needed a PDP-10 to run it].
For what it's worth, BLISS does not have a GOTO expression (BLISS
doesn't have statements per se--everything is an expression and can be
used as a value).
Wulf was studying code optimization. His BLISS-11 compiler, and its
successor at DEC, BLISS-16, implemented many advanced (for the day)
optimizations. In the programming environments at CMU and DEC it was
easier to suffer the mild inconvenience of cross-compilation than to
try to shoehorn the compiler into a 16-bit address space.
It certainly would be possible to implement a native BLISS compiler
for the PDP-11, but you'd have to sacrifice either some of the
optimizations or take a big hit in compilation speed.
-Paul W.