OK, more history...

In 1973, I spent a 9 month Sabbatical at the University of Waterloo in Canada. When I left, B was the dominant language on Unix -- when I came back, C had taken over. I had made a B compiler for the Honeywell mainframe, as much to test out Yacc as anything. When I came back, an Intern from MIT, Al Snyder, had rewritten my B compilers into C compilers. He left, and I took back his code. Dennis' compiler was still the touchstone on Unix, but Al's was working on the Honeywell and there was a lot of interest in making one for OS 360 and also for an internal switching machine.   Al's compiler for the Honeywell still had a fair number of bugs, mostly in the code generation phase (the code to decide what to do when the compiler ran out of registers went from one page to two pages to four pages and there were still bugs).

Also, about this time I had a fateful discussion with Dennis, in which he said "I think it may be easier to port Unix to a new piece of hardware than to port a complex application from Unix to a new OS" (Most OS's in those days were unique to their hardware, and written in assembler). Clearly, such a plan required a portable compiler and I agreed to take a stab at it...    I started with the existing compilers and began editing them to make the similar code in the various compilers identical. I started with the front end--the back-end work seemed to be (and was) rather harder.   The grammar and lexer were fairly easy to clean up, but I really didn't have a good way to test them... And the type system was new and evolving.

At that time, C was still fairly close to B. For example, there were no function prototypes, so a common source of bugs was to change a function but miss some of the invocations, leading, usually, to crashes. There were also no header files -- the system structures were printed in the manual (!).   And, 32-bit machines were beginning to come along and looked attractive.   I realized that I could kill several birds with one stone by using my nascent front end to parse C programs and then print out a line for every function call and definition with the function name, location, and argument types. A bit of Unix magic took these lines and sorted them, and a small program then read the combined file and complained when a function was called or defined inconsistently. And, as a side effect, I found and fixed a number of front-end bugs.

We decided to purchase an Interdata 8/32, a 32-bit machine with an instruction set that looked like a cleaned-up IBM 360, and all of a sudden portability became much more important. We had to do something about about all those structure definitions printed in the manual. Over the summer, the concept of header files was developed, and Lint at one point required that system calls had to use the structure definitions in these header files -- a copy from the manual was no longer acceptable. Also, as the compiler developed, we added additional portability messages and some useful things like flagging expressions that didn't do anything and statements that could not be reached.

Lint continued for a long time to share the front end of the portable C compiler.

I should mention that I was not the first person to write a program to criticize other programs. Barbara Ryder at the Labs had written, in FORTRAN, program called PFORT that would look at FORTRAN programs and flag constructions that would not work on the 6 major FORTRAN compilers in use at the time. There were a surprising number of differences between these languages, and we were able to write a symbolic algebra system in FORTRAN that ran on all these systems largely because of the effectiveness of PFORT.

Finally, the name... At the time Lint first appeared, I had two young children at home. This was in the era of cloth diapers, and we were doing a LOT of wash. One day, as I was cleaning out the lint trap in our dryer, I realized that the program I was writing was performing a similar function, and the name was born. Since then, I have written a number of Lint-like programs -- I'm proudest of the one I did when working for the MathWorks. It was integrated into the MATLAB editor, and could give nearly instant feedback when you typed in faulty code.

----- Original Message -----
From:
"Nemo" <cym224@gmail.com>

To:
"Steve Johnson" <scj@yaccman.com>
Cc:
"TUHS main list" <tuhs@minnie.tuhs.org>
Sent:
Wed, 4 Jan 2017 20:30:48 -0500
Subject:
What sparked lint? [Was: Unix stories]

On 4 January 2017 at 13:51, Steve Johnson <scj@yaccman.com> wrote (in part):
> These rules provided rich fodder for Lint, when it came along, [...]

All this lint talk caused me to reread your Lint article but no
history there. Was there a specific incident that begat lint?

N.