Re: What is the smallest self-hosting language?

WISP was certainly interesting and small and real. Many instructors
used it to teach language methods. But as I recall it was an
interpreter based on a macro processor. It would interpret itself
nicely.


Going back to the (not so long ago) 8080 days, the original Small C
[Hendrix] would self compile and occupied only a few pages of source
code. Even further back, Halstead described an abbreviated version of
Nelliac (Pilot) that would self compile and was very small.


> 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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