Re: 40 year old compilers

glen herrmannsfeldt <gah@ugcs.caltech.edu> writes:
>So, I wonder (cross post replies) about favorite 40 year old compiler
>books, especially if written using C-like languages


I like [wulf+75]; however, that's mostly about optimizing, and I don't
think that C compilers of that time had serious ambitions in that
direction.


Given that C compilers from 1973 came from Bell Labs, and Al Aho
worked at Bell Labs, the books he coauthored around that time might
fit the bill.


@Book{wulf+75,
    author = {William Wulf and Richard K. Johnsson and Charles
                                    B. Weinstock and Steven O. Hobbs and Charles M. Geschke},
    title = {The Design of an Optimizing Compiler},
    publisher = {Elsvier},
    year = {1975},
    isbn = {0-444-0164-6},
    annote = {Describes a complete Bliss/11 compiler for the
                                    PDP-11. It uses some interesting techniques: it
                                    uses a (hand-constructed) tree parsing automaton for
                                    parts of the code selection (Section~3.4); it
                                    optimizes the use of unary complement operators
                                    (Section~3.3); it uses a smart scheme to represent
                                    a conservative approximation of the lifetime of
                                    variables in constant space and uses that for
                                    register allocation (Sections~4.1.3 and~4.3).}
}


- anton
--
M. Anton Ertl
anton@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at
http://www.complang.tuwien.ac.at/anton/

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