[TUHS] Knuth and Unix

[Bakul Shah]

On Sat, 12 Jan 2019 19:41:26 -0800 "Steve Johnson" <scj at yaccman.com> wrote:
> One connection Knuth had to Unix was inventing LALR parsing, the basic
> algorithm used in Yacc.  I added some things (notably, the precedence
> mechanism) and had to do a lot of engineering to be able to handle large
> grammars (e.g. F77) on a PDP-11.  But the underlying algorithm (taught to
> my be Al Aho) was all Knuth.

Knuth invented LR parsing but IIRC it was DeRemer who came up
with LALR parsing. In 78-79 I was implementing a LALR(1)
parser generator in Pascal on strength of which I got my first
real job.  At that job I used DeRemer and Pennello's 1979
paper to reimplement the parser generator.