On 3 Jan 2003, Oleg Goldshmidt wrote: > Shlomi Fish <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes: > > > And C is the only language that is expected to bootstrap > > itself.[1] > > <snipped to footnote> > > > [1] - There are a few exceptions. ghc is an Haskell compiler that is the > > only tool capable of compiling its own Haskell code. The GNU Ada compiler > > is written in Ada. There's also a Dylan compiler written in Dylan, but > > luckily there's also a Dylan interpreter written in C that can > > compile it. > > I cannot sit silent: obviously you are forgetting Lisp Machines > that ran Lisp interpreters written in Lisp. ;-) >
LOL. I mentioned a few cases that made this decision, but naturally there are others. An interesting case is what they are planning to do in Parrot: The back-end will be written in C, but the front-end can be written in higher-level language. Some of them are now written in Perl. Now, they want to write a Perl 5 compiler for Parrot in Perl 5, compile it to parrot bytecode, and then use the bytecode as a Perl compiler which can compile its own code. It will be bootstrapped with the current perl5 implementation. > Now, going backwards in time from the beginning of the UNIX epoche, > to the two oldest high level languages that are still in use today: > Fortran and Lisp. Any self-respecting Lisp/Scheme book shows how to > write a Lisp engine in Lisp. I've seen the Meta-Circular Evalutaor of SICP. But I find it hard to believe that the entire Common Lisp can be re-implemented in itself (without using the native eval), in a reasonable amount of code that would fit into a textbook. It's simply too big. > Was there ever a Fortran compiler written > in Fortran? The only page that mentions something like that in passing > is http://www.nersc.gov/~deboni/Computer.history/Mendicino.html. > I know that many Fortran compilers were written throughout the ages, but I don't know in what languages. An optimizing Fortran compiler was recently voted as one of the top ten algorithms of the 20th century. Now, in "the Mythical Man-Month" Fred Brooks describes how they wrote OS/360 in Assembler, but that he would then recommended to use a higher-level language instead, preferabbly PL/I. Regards, Shlomi Fish > > -- > Oleg Goldshmidt | [EMAIL PROTECTED] > > ================================================================= > To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with > the word "unsubscribe" in the message body, e.g., run the command > echo unsubscribe |mail [EMAIL PROTECTED] > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- Shlomi Fish [EMAIL PROTECTED] Home Page: http://t2.technion.ac.il/~shlomif/ Home E-mail: [EMAIL PROTECTED] "Let's suppose you have a table with 2^n cups..." "Wait a second - is n a natural number?" ================================================================= To unsubscribe, send mail to [EMAIL PROTECTED] with the word "unsubscribe" in the message body, e.g., run the command echo unsubscribe | mail [EMAIL PROTECTED]
