Re: [9fans] My Eu paper, mark 2

[Charles Forsyth <forsyth@caldo.demon.co.uk>]

>>yacc.  Ken claims that it takes 3 weeks to port his compiler (and
>>assembler and loader) to a new machine, but that's with Ken doing the
>>porting, working long days.

it can be somewhat less than that.  it rather depends
on the nature of the target processor, whether there's something
similar in the existing suite, and whether you feel the need to do an
interpreter as well.  i've found it the easiest
compiler suite to port that produces reasonable code.
i like its broad division of work for the machine analysis.
unlike the usual assembler/linker grunge, to which people seem glued,
there isn't repetition of work as regards the instruction encoding.
lcc is probably quicker to port but then you still need the
usual assembler/loader grunge, and the code isn't as good.
(nice compiler, though.)

>>problems rather than any real need.  I don't know how many people were
>>used to implement the full Algol 68 language either.  And MIPS's

Algol68R and Algol68C were both done by comparatively small groups,
although it would probably be fair to say that both compilers did subsets.