Re: Compiler or interpreter?

Al Kossow <aek@bitsavers.org>
Fri, 18 Jun 2010 11:15:03 -0700

          From comp.compilers
Related articles
Compiler or interpreter? gah@ugcs.caltech.edu (glen herrmannsfeldt) (2010-06-13)
Re: Compiler or interpreter? anton@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at (2010-06-15)
Re: Compiler or interpreter? gah@ugcs.caltech.edu (glen herrmannsfeldt) (2010-06-16)
Re: Compiler or interpreter? gah@ugcs.caltech.edu (glen herrmannsfeldt) (2010-06-17)
re: Compiler or interpreter? ehog.hedge@googlemail.com (chris dollin) (2010-06-18)
Re: Compiler or interpreter? cr88192@hotmail.com (BGB / cr88192) (2010-06-18)
Re: Compiler or interpreter? paul.biggar@gmail.com (Paul Biggar) (2010-06-18)
Re: Compiler or interpreter? aek@bitsavers.org (Al Kossow) (2010-06-18)
Re: Compiler or interpreter? gah@ugcs.caltech.edu (glen herrmannsfeldt) (2010-06-18)
Re: Compiler or interpreter? cr88192@hotmail.com (BGB / cr88192) (2010-06-19)
Re: Compiler or interpreter? gah@ugcs.caltech.edu (glen herrmannsfeldt) (2010-06-19)
Re: Compiler or interpreter? cr88192@hotmail.com (BGB / cr88192) (2010-06-20)
| List of all articles for this month |
From: Al Kossow <aek@bitsavers.org>
Newsgroups: comp.compilers
Date: Fri, 18 Jun 2010 11:15:03 -0700
Organization: A noiseless patient Spider
References: 10-06-043
Keywords: interpreter, history
Posted-Date: 18 Jun 2010 14:20:40 EDT

On 6/18/10 12:15 AM, chris dollin wrote:


> If you knew where the line between "true compiler" and "an
> interpreter" ["just" is pejorative] was, what would you do
> differently?


I am the poser of the original question on alt.sys.pdp11


It came up when some friends of mine and I were discussing system
programming languages, and we were trying to think of the first compiler
hosted on a PDP-11 which generated non-interpreted, ie. "native" code.


I didn't realize it was such a difficult question to answer.
[It's not hard because we don't know the difference, it's hard because
we can't remember the sequence of events. Like pornography, we know a
compiler when we see it. My recollection is that the early support
for the PDP-11 was mostly an assembler, a linker, and some I/O
libraries. I'm not sure whether DEC shipped a native code compiler
(as opposed to assembler) before the proto-C compiler at Bell Labs
started generating machine code rather than the threaded code that B
used. -John]








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