[TUHS] DEC Compilers (was: Re: SDB debugger

Doug McIlroy doug at cs.dartmouth.edu
Wed May 6 12:52:46 AEST 2020


> random small C programs with computable expected outputs

"computable" is subtle here. The only way to compute the
outputs was to run the program. McKeeman's trick was to
sic several completely unrelated compilers on the program
and let them vote on the answer.

Compile time was measured. My favorite "bug" was the
mmany minutes it took to compile a constant expression
that involved shifting a constant INT_MAX bits by
performing that many 1-bit shifts.

Doug


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