[TUHS] Looking for final C compiler by Dennis Ritchie

Larry McVoy lm at mcvoy.com
Tue Jul 24 01:55:52 AEST 2018


On Mon, Jul 23, 2018 at 11:12:49AM -0400, Clem Cole wrote:
> On Sun, Jul 22, 2018 at 4:49 PM, Dibyendu Majumdar <mobile at majumdar.org.uk>
> wrote:
> 
> >
> >
> > It seems that Dennis Ritchie wrote a paper 'A Tour through the Unix C
> > Compiler' which is quite useful in understanding the compiler. I have
> > converted the doc to Markdown format as well which makes it easier to
> > read.
> 
> 
> https://s3-us-west-2.amazonaws.com/belllabs-microsite-plan9/7thEdMan/bswv7.html
> 
> ???You might try downloading the PDF or PS versions of the V7 documents from
> amazon.   It seems like a lot less work work and will be a lot easier to
> read.   Also Gnu groff runs on pretty much everything these days, so going
> from the V7 troff sources yourself is not difficult; in fact its pretty
> smart.   Its still the best 'pure document compiler' out there.  And it
> means you can add your additions/ corrections / notes to what Dennis did
> right inline.

I actually wacked a bunch of the Unix docs to make them look a little
better, I should see if I can find that.

I agree that roff is awesome, it's a bummer that Latex seems to be
the winner (which I think is purely because the roff/eqn/pic/etc
docs weren't widely available back in the day).



More information about the TUHS mailing list