Re: Which comes first, languages or compilers?

On 2023-10-25, gah4 <gah4@u.washington.edu> wrote:
> Not from a Quora question, but one did remind me.
>
> Which (well known) languages were mostly defined before the first
> compiler was written? (Not counting the one you did for a homework
> assignment.)


Lisp is one example. Definitions for interpreting it (not compiling)
were written by McCarthy on paper, in Lisp. Steve Russel realized that
you can translate that specification to machine code to get
a working implementation. At first McCarthy was famously taken aback,
thinking that Russel is working under some misconception: the document
is for people, not for the machine.


So it is very clear that the semantics of Lisp evaluation was first
defined in a document intended for human use, which turned out to be
susceptible hand-translation to an interpreter.


(Compiling followed not long after that; I think by around 1960
they were compiling it.)
--
TXR Programming Language: http://nongnu.org/txr
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[Lisp was considerably more than McCarthy's paper design. The CAR and
CDR function names refer to the addresss and decrement parts of a
memory word on the IBM 704 which presumably did not come up before
they implemented it. -John]

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