[HN Gopher] The Fortran I Compiler (2000) [pdf]
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The Fortran I Compiler (2000) [pdf]
Author : Bostonian
Score : 53 points
Date : 2021-03-28 11:36 UTC (11 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (web.stanford.edu)
(TXT) w3m dump (web.stanford.edu)
| PaulHoule wrote:
| You could make a case that the dragon book held back compiler
| development by popularizing a number of second or third rate
| methods. Many old mainfrsme compilers used techniques a little
| too advanced to make it into the books.
| Athas wrote:
| Which techniques are these?
| jhgb wrote:
| No the GP, but I would assume Fran Allen's work would be
| involved in that? Surely that had some impact on mainframe
| compilers.
| Athas wrote:
| Yes, but I'm curious which specific transformations and
| optimisations were specific to the mainframe culture. C
| compilers specifically were pretty crude for a while, but
| there was lots of other stuff going on (e.g. all the work
| on compiler optimisations for Lisp).
|
| I'm not a fan of the Dragon Book, but I also don't think it
| held back much (although I'm not an expert on its societal
| impact). The older editions had very little about
| optimisations at all.
| PaulHoule wrote:
| Older compilers use techniques across the board and are not
| based on a systematic theory.
|
| There was one Fortran compiler from that era for the 1401
| that made more than 50 'passes' to minimize memory use.
|
| Today 'N passes for large N' is popular for experimental
| compilers, not to save memory, but because the passes
| themselves are easy to write. (At resource expense, and the
| danger that users will never be able to understand error
| messages.)
|
| PL/I and Algol were targeting the space that C took over but
| had good and bad ideas that were abandoned, misunderstood,
| forgotten, etc. For instance the first Algol had no
| definition of how to do I/O which sounds terrible at first --
| except today a C prog might throw away the stdlib like
| arduino does.
| fortran77 wrote:
| Don't forget FORTAN's influence on BASIC. See
| https://www.gamasutra.com/view/news/216469/A_basic_history_o...
| bobochan wrote:
| It was not just an influence on BASIC, but the raison d'etre,
| "It should be a stepping-stone for students who may later wish
| to learn one of the standard languages, such as FORTRAN or
| ALGOL."
|
| https://www.dartmouth.edu/basicfifty/basicmanual_1964.pdf
| transhipper wrote:
| Fortran is the first imperative high level language and it had
| impact on almost all the computer languages created after that.
| rst wrote:
| Well, certainly the first to be widely implemented. After the
| original Fortran for the 704, there were compilers for a
| bunch of other machines, not always using the "Fortran" name.
| And, per this article, the first to have a meaningful
| optimizer. (Terms such as "basic block" first occured in 1957
| technical papers on its internals.)
|
| However, there were earlier languages which were at least
| high-level enough to support algebraic notation. Perhaps the
| first the compiler written by Laning and Zierler for the
| Whirlwind at MIT:
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Laning_and_Zierler_system
| (which was thought for a while to have been an inspiration
| for Fortran -- but the head of the Fortran project, John
| Backus, later found notes from before Laning and Zierler
| published).
| BruceEel wrote:
| Ah, just as I was contemplating giving up on the tangled mess
| that my own register allocation code is evolving into...
| Inspiring read. Thanks!
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