7 Feb
2022
7 Feb
'22
9:04 a.m.
On 1/29/2022 11:59 AM, Clem Cole wrote:
Sun later brought the UCB PI and PC to the SunOS, but
pls Rob G/Larry
correct me here - I think they later did their own compiler when they
did their new C and Fortran.
Sun never replaced the UCB Pascal front-end, just moved it across
back-ends as it evolved them.
The development of SPARC required Sun to develop back-end expertise.
Although the investments focused on SPARC, there was also work on the
back-ends for the Motorola- and Intel-based products.
Sun's front-end investments began with the SVR4 project as an ANSI C
compiler was needed. (A priority for SVR4 was conformance with
then-current external standards such as POSIX and ANSI. Over the course
of SVR4's development strict ANSI conformance came to be seen as
problematic: most SV licensees didn't just use the release as delivered
and instead merged portions into their extant, and not ANSI, product
source code bases. This led to some late-in-the-project de-ANSIfying of
the source in the interest of making SVR4 more digestible by the licensees.)
That C compiler was the basis for the unbundled C compiler product that
came out at the time of SunOS 4.1.
Sun's larger investments in front-end development were motivated by the
later transition from F77 to F9X. Which is another data point in support
of Clem's frequent observation that FORTRAN is a big deal in parts of
the real world. At that point Sun tended to its own front ends for C,
C++, and FORTRAN but Pascal was always the UCB front end.