[pups] Bringing up the fist C compiler

[tfb@cley.com (Tim Bradshaw)]

* Johnny Billquist wrote:

> How? It was written, of course. In assembler. By that time, you already
> had the assembler, an editor, and other commonly used system programs, so
> it's just a case of the normal development cycle.

Is this known or is it deduction?

(In case there is any confusion here: I do understand very well how
compilers can be implemented on naked machines without preexisting
tools (and indeed I've done more-or-less this with assemblers on
microcomputers, ending up with a perfectly fine assembler which used
the wrong opcode names, because we didn't know what the right ones
were...).  So my question `how was x done' is not `I don't understand
how you can do this' but `historically, what were the steps in this
case'. What I'm trying to find out is what the actual course of events
was for C, so I can give glib answers to people (:-))

--tim