[TUHS] Re: uphill both ways, was Re: What would early alternatives to C have been?

["John Levine" <johnl@taugh.com>]

It appears that Charles H. Sauer <sauer@technologists.com> said:
>In 1971 compiler construction course at UT-Austin, we had to use CDC Fortran to build a compiler for a subset of Algol 60. Undergraduates
>used punch cards and RJE to the 6600/6400 shared by all but the privleged few.

In my 1971 compiler course at Yale, Alan Perlis made us try to write a compiler
that translated a subset of APL into Basic. He suggested we write it in APL,
which was a terrible idea, so I wrote it in Trac, for which I happened to have
written my own interpreter.

I think my compiler was the only one that worked, and it was pretty clever,
turning the APL array expressions into structures with array boundaries and
example expressions, with no array temporaries. It only generated the loops to
evaluate the expressions when storing into another array.

Someone got a PhD in 1978 for a similar compiling technique but in 1971 I was a
17 year old twerp so what did I know?

R's,
John