For a stillborn language, Dr. Dobbs published the Pidgen meta compiler. It was written in glyphs and looked machine generated. The editor published it out of order and later corrected the ordering in a retraction. I doubt anyone ever got it working.
On Wed, Jun 24, 2026 at 4:03 PM Graham Toal via cctalk <[email protected]> wrote: > > There were some issues with UNCOL which Peter Robertson attempted to > remediate in his more successful portable intermediate code, ICODE, which > eventually was used in implementations of Imp, Pascal, Fortran, Occam and > C. > > https://www.gtoal.com/imp77/psrthesis/psrthesis.html > > (that's the same intermediate code that I based my recent Imp77 to C > translation on as mentioned in an earlier post) > > It would still be usable but no-one has produced a native code generating > back end using ICode since the late 80's. (well, except our x86 > recreation). Back in the day there were the languages I mentioned above as > front ends and about 20 different architecture back ends. It was quite a > successful example of an UNCOL-like system. > > G > > > On Sun, Jun 21, 2026 at 8:43 PM Van Snyder via cctalk <[email protected]> > wrote: > > > About forty years ago there were attempts to define UNCOL, the > > Universal Compiler-Oriented Language, as an intermediary between front > > ends and code generators.
