[TUHS] Re: History of non-Bell C compilers?

["William H. Mitchell" <whm@msweng.com>]

Speaking of Hanson, I had the great privilege of taking a compilers class from him at the U of Arizona in the early 80s.  We wrote a recursive descent C compiler, a linker, and a debugger. They were all "real", albeit with simplifications.  Hanson wrote the DEC-10 C compiler that we students used.  He wrote enough of an i/o library for our needs, with installments barely ahead of when we needed them. :)

An interesting simplification Hanson used was that 'sizeof <everything>' was 1.  I still marvel at what a great lesson about C that is.  (A YAGNI lesson, too, I suppose.)

When the question of "What’s the best class you ever had?" comes up, my answer is, Dave Hanson’s 453.  Hanson’s slides (and more) are in https://www2.cs.arizona.edu/~whm/csc453-fall1983-DRHanson.pdf.  The slides start on 44.

I also worked for both Hanson and later, Fraser.  To this day I’m impressed that Fraser consistently resisted the temptation for choke me to death for being an idiot who thought he knew everything.

The LCC book Rob cites below is surely a classic and, as written in its Foreword, the book is an example of a "literate program".

--whm

> On Mar 7, 2024, at 5:57 PM, Rob Pike <robpike@gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> Chris Fraser and Dave Hanson did LLC and wrote a book about it, very clean and pedagogically valuable.
> 
> https://www.amazon.com.au/Retargetable-C-Compiler-Design-Implementation/dp/0805316701
> 
> -rob