[TUHS] Re: On the uniqueness of DMR's C compiler

[Paul McJones <paul@mcjones.org>]

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> On Wed, 8 May 2024 14:12:15 -0400,Clem Cole <clemc@ccc.com <mailto:clemc@ccc.com>> wrote:
> 
> FWIW:  The DEC Mod-II and Mod-III
> were new implementations from DEC WRL or SRC (I forget).  They targeted
> Alpha and I, maybe Vax.  I'd have to ask someone like Larry Stewart or Jeff
> Mogul who might know/remember, but I thought that the font end to the DEC
> MOD2 compiler might have been partly based on Wirths but rewritten and by
> the time of the MOD3 FE was a new one originally written using the previous
> MOD2 compiler -- but I don't remember that detail.

Michael Powell at DEC WRL wrote a Modula 2 compiler that generated VAX code. Here’s an extract from announcement.d accompanying a 1992 release of the compiler from gatekeeper.dec.com <http://gatekeeper.dec.com/>:

The compiler was designed and built by Michael L. Powell, and originally
released in 1984.  Joel McCormack sped the compiler up, fixed lots of bugs, and
swiped/wrote a User's Manual.  Len Lattanzi ported the compiler to the MIPS. 

Later, Paul Rovner and others at DEC SRC designed Modula-2+ (a language extension with exceptions, threads, garbage collection, and runtime type dispatch). The Modula-2+ compiler was originally based on Powell’s compiler. Modula-2+ ran on the VAX.

Here’s a DEC SRC research report on Modula-2+:
http://www.bitsavers.org/pdf/dec/tech_reports/SRC-RR-3.pdf

Modula-3 was designed at DEC SRC and Olivetti Labs. It had a portable implementation (using the GCC back end) and ran on a number of machines including Alpha.


Paul



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