Re: [TUHS] Happy birthday, John Backus!

[Paul Winalski <paul.winalski@gmail.com>]

On 12/4/18, Clem Cole <clemc@ccc.com> wrote:
>
> The first DEC compilers for the 360 bit and 12 bit lines were written in
> assembler, but they switched to BLISS (and some other languages for
> different front-ends) by the 70s for the newer generations of compilers.
>  Paul can give that history as he was part of it.

Unfortunately I can't give much of DEC's compiler history as I was a
member of the software development tools team at the time.  I didn't
pay too much attention to what was going on with the VAX compilers.  I
moved to the compiler world in 1985 as part of the GEM compiler back
end team, which was tasked with developing a new, common back end to
replace the various VAX code generators going forward.  The compiler
guys wanted to concentrate on optimization and code generation, so
they hired me--a software development tools guy--to design and
implement the non-compiler parts of the back end such as command line
parsing, heap memory management, file I/O, and object file generation.
Over the years GEM was targeted to MIPS, PRISM, Alpha, and Itanium
machine architectures, and VMS, Unix, Linux, and Windows NT operating
systems.  We were working on x86 when Compaq sold the Alpha
architecture and its engineering team (including GEM) to Intel.  Intel
never did anything with the GEM technology.

BLISS was DEC engineering's official implementation language.
BLISS-32 was used for the VAX.  I'm pretty sure VAX Fortran, VAX
COBOL, VAX BASIC, and VAX Pascal were all written in BLISS.  They all
had their own independently developed code generators.  VAX C and VAX
PL/I were written by Dave Cutler's compiler group in the late
70s/early 80s.  They shared a common back end called the VAX Code
Generator (VCG).  I don't know what the implementation language for
VCG was; I think it was C (Dave Cutler was not a BLISS fan).  VAX PL/I
used the Frieburghouse PL/I front end, which I think was written in C.
VAX Ada was also VCG-based; the front end was written in BLISS.
VAXeln Pascal might have been written in Pascal.

All of DEC's Alpha compilers used GEM as the back end.  There was also
a VAX MACRO GEM-based compiler that took VAX assembler as its input
language and generated native Alpha code.  GEM was originally
completely written in BLISS, but in the mid-1980s I started rewriting
the modules under my control in the common subset of C/C++ to take
advantage of strong typing (BLISS has no data typing whatsoever).  DEC
C/C++ for Alpha used the Edison Design Group C/C++ front end.  DEC
acquired COMPASS's compiler technology and DEC Fortran used the
COMPASS Fortran front end to support Fortran 90.  That code is written
in C.

-Paul W.