Re: History and evolution of compilers

  >>> The moderator wrote:
  >>>> Fortran IV did get two compilers on the 360 series, Fortran G
  >>>> which was fast and generated rotten code, and Fortran H which
  >>>> produced very good code. -John]


>>>>> "Richard" == Richard Weaver <rweaver@ix.netcom.com> writes:


> Fortran G was written by another company (I've forgotten the name)
> in the POP language, for IBM. There was a technology transfer from
> that company to several existing (or merged/absorbed) companies,
> sometimes by people leaving the original company and founding their
> own company.


> Should you be able to locate/identify those people, your history
> will have solid lines (this came from there) as opposed to dashed
> lines (the concepts used here may have been based on concepts first
> used there).


I can't remember the company name (digitek? ... maybe) but the authors
were Don Ryan and Dave McFarland, now probably better known for
Ryan-McFarland COBOL. I was not aware of any "technology transfer"
since I believe, at the time, Ryan and McFarland were the whole
company, but I could be wrong about that. Their "pops fortran"
probably showed up on most of the smaller scale computers extant at
the time, so the technology was well known, and I have seen it
referred to as their "elegant little fortran compiler".


The IBM 360 was probably pretty big iron for this compiler, but I
suspect they were called in because the H compiler would have been
unacceptably late and the 360 would have been without any Fortran at
all.


    Mike McKernan
[The compiler generated pretty good code on the PDP-6, but did badly on
the 360 because it didn't know anything about the 360's base register
addressing. I can believe that Fortran H was horribly late, since all
the other OS/360 software was, too. -John]


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