[Info-vax] The (now lost) future of Alpha.

[Arne Vajhøj]

On 8/1/2018 2:07 PM, invalid wrote:
> On 2018-08-01, Arne Vajhøj <arne at vajhoej.dk> wrote:
>> On 7/31/2018 4:18 PM, invalid wrote:
>>> On 2018-07-29, Simon Clubley <clubley at remove_me.eisner.decus.org-Earth.UFP> wrote:
>>>> On 2018-07-29, invalid <address at is.invalid> wrote:
>>>>> What should they have used to write a FORTRAN compiler in 1957 or 1966?
>>>>> A COBOL compiler in 1959? A PL/I compiler in 1964?
>>>>
>>>> High level languages were a _lot_ simpler back in those days. :-)
>>>
>>> Maybe, but the point was there was no other choice of implementation
>>> language in those days. And 50+ years later  we're still using those
>>> languages (except for IBM FORTRAN, which is sadly lost in time at F77+)
>>> now. Which is why the compilers are still mostly assembler. Except maybe for
>>> C/C++ which may be heading towards self-hosting.
>>
>> Well - C and C++ seems to be the most widely used languages
>> for compilers (at least compilers generating native code).
> 
> C and C++ have less than .1% market share on the mainframe.

Yes, but compilers are a relative specialized area.

>                                                           And they will
> never catch on very much because they are broken, unsafe languages that are
> too high level to be useful for writing systems software and too low level
> to be used for writing applications.

They are totally dominating the market for systems software in general.

> If you want to argue based on what you know about other environments that's
> all well and good. You're wasting our time with this approach. I work in
> this environment and you guys don't.

Whether C++ is a good language for writing a compiler has nothing
to do with the platform knowledge.

A compiler does: reads a text file, does lexical analysis, parse
the tokens, usually generate some sort of intermediate code,
do optimization, generate output (either text file with assembler
or binary file with object code).

In some cases the compilation is not even done on the target
platform (cross compilation).

Arne