Re: The making of compilers

[Jeffrey Carter <jeffrey.carter@boeing.com>]

Robert Dewar wrote:
> 
> Jeffrey Carter <jeffrey.carter@boeing.com> wrote in message news:<3C7D1B7A.5A17002E@boeing.com>...
> > My recollection of a talk by Ichbiah (at the time) was that they wrote
> > the Alsys compiler in Ada 83 and wrote a program (presumably in PL/1) to
> > translate Ada 83 to PL/1. Once the executable worked well enough, of
> > course, they stopped using the translator and just compiled the compiler
> > with the compiler.
> 
> Yes, that's exactly right, and that's what I meant by a
> subset compiler written in PL/1 (converting Ada to another
> language is one possible way of writing a compiler for
> Ada, even today there are Ada 95 compilers that work by
> translating to C).

I guess we use different terms for the same thing: I wouldn't use the
term "written in PL/1" to describe translating Ada to PL/1 anymore than
I'd say something compiled using a compiler that outputs C was "written
in C".

-- 
Jeffrey Carter