[pups] Bringing up the fist C compiler

[Johnny Billquist]

On Thu, 5 Sep 2002, Tim Bradshaw wrote:

> * Johnny Billquist wrote:
> 
> > How? It was written, of course. In assembler. By that time, you already
> > had the assembler, an editor, and other commonly used system programs, so
> > it's just a case of the normal development cycle.
> 
> Is this known or is it deduction?

[...]

Ah. Ok, now I understand what you're asking for.
You want to know what the first C was written in, and what that
compiler/assembler was written in/on, and so on...

No, I'm just deducting. Since the reference posted said that TMG was the
first higher level language implemented, it follows that it must have been
written in a low level language, namely assembler.

Admittedly, the PDP-7 TMG *could* have been written in some high level
language on some other machine using some tool that made a PDP-7
executable, so your guess is as good as mine.

But even though I cannot account for all steps, I can guarantee that at
the end of the chain, you *will* find assembler.

I guess my MACRO-11 implementation of C isn't good enough. :-)
(Well, it ain't mine, it's the normal DECUS C, but I'm hacked some at it.)

	Johnny

Johnny Billquist                  || "I'm on a bus
                                  ||  on a psychedelic trip
email: bqt at update.uu.se           ||  Reading murder books
pdp is alive!                     ||  tryin' to stay hip" - B. Idol