Re: What is the smallest self-hosting language?

"Peter Wilson" <peter.r.wilson@boeing.com>
11 Feb 2003 02:00:53 -0500

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Related articles
[3 earlier articles]
Re: What is the smallest self-hosting language? qsmgmt@earthlink.net (Alan Lehotsky) (2003-01-26)
Re: What is the smallest self-hosting language? ed_davis2@yahoo.com (2003-01-29)
Re: What is the smallest self-hosting language? s_dubrovich@yahoo.com (2003-01-30)
Re: What is the smallest self-hosting language? idbaxter@semdesigns.com (Ira Baxter) (2003-02-05)
Re: What is the smallest self-hosting language? alexc@world.std.com (2003-02-06)
Re: What is the smallest self-hosting language? torbenm@diku.dk (2003-02-11)
Re: What is the smallest self-hosting language? peter.r.wilson@boeing.com (Peter Wilson) (2003-02-11)
Re: What is the smallest self-hosting language? nworth@earthlink.net (Norman Worth) (2003-02-21)
| List of all articles for this month |

From: "Peter Wilson" <peter.r.wilson@boeing.com>
Newsgroups: comp.compilers
Date: 11 Feb 2003 02:00:53 -0500
Organization: The Boeing Company
References: 03-01-013 03-01-106 03-01-133
Keywords: theory
Posted-Date: 11 Feb 2003 02:00:53 EST

> I found myself wondering what the smallest self-hosting language would
> look like. ...


> [Someone once did an amusing least-fixed-point exercise feeding the
> output of a compiler back into the compiler until it converged. But I
> suppose that's not quite the same thing. There are some rather small
> Lisp-in-Lisp and Scheme-in-Scheme programs. -John]


        Maurice Wilkes describes a set of bootstrapped compilers for
"WISP" with the result acceptable by the EDSAC 2 Assembly Routine. I
had fun years ago with this. The reference is: M.V.Wilkes, "An
Experiment with a Self-compiling Compiler for a Simple List-processing
Langauge", Annual Review in Automatic Programming, vol 4, pp 1-48,
1964. The paper also gives a WISP program for formal differentiation
of some simple algebraic expressions.


Peter W.


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