Re: Which comes first, languages or compilers?

"Luke A. Guest" <laguest@archeia.com>
Fri, 27 Oct 2023 16:57:50 +0100

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Which comes first, languages or compilers? gah4@u.washington.edu (gah4) (2023-10-25)
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From: "Luke A. Guest" <laguest@archeia.com>
Newsgroups: comp.compilers
Date: Fri, 27 Oct 2023 16:57:50 +0100
Organization: Compilers Central
References: 23-10-008
Injection-Info: gal.iecc.com; posting-host="news.iecc.com:2001:470:1f07:1126:0:676f:7373:6970"; logging-data="9462"; mail-complaints-to="abuse@iecc.com"
Keywords: design, history
Posted-Date: 29 Oct 2023 13:47:41 EDT
In-Reply-To: 23-10-008

On 25/10/2023 20:39, gah4 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.) ...
> [COBOL, Algol60 and 68, Ada. Maybe Pascal? -John]


You can definitely count Ada as being defined before being
implemented. You can find the various language designs put forward by
looking for "common hol phase 1" in this group.


I don't really consider any of Wirth's languages to be designed as
they would not have the gaping big holes they have. Aiming to having
short specifications is not really a good thing, but it comes across
as half-arsed and you end up leaving a metric shit-ton of "undefined"
things that should've been defined up to the implementor, creating
"implementation defined" and incompatible variants, see Pascal,
Modula-2 and Oberon and their variants.

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