From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 X-Spam-Checker-Version: SpamAssassin 3.4.4 (2020-01-24) on polar.synack.me X-Spam-Level: X-Spam-Status: No, score=-1.9 required=5.0 tests=BAYES_00 autolearn=ham autolearn_force=no version=3.4.4 X-Google-Language: ENGLISH,ASCII-7-bit X-Google-Thread: 103376,448990452c132610 X-Google-Attributes: gid103376,public X-Google-ArrivalTime: 2002-03-01 11:35:05 PST Path: archiver1.google.com!postnews1.google.com!not-for-mail From: dewar@gnat.com (Robert Dewar) Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Subject: Re: The making of compilers Date: 1 Mar 2002 11:35:04 -0800 Organization: http://groups.google.com/ Message-ID: <5ee5b646.0203011135.12a13558@posting.google.com> References: NNTP-Posting-Host: 205.232.38.14 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit X-Trace: posting.google.com 1015011305 20778 127.0.0.1 (1 Mar 2002 19:35:05 GMT) X-Complaints-To: groups-abuse@google.com NNTP-Posting-Date: 1 Mar 2002 19:35:05 GMT Xref: archiver1.google.com comp.lang.ada:20667 Date: 2002-03-01T19:35:05+00:00 List-Id: Keith Thompson wrote in message news:... > I would have thought that Cobol was a poor language for > implementing a compiler, but Robert Dewar and others > apparently did just that with Realia Cobol. My guess is that Keith is not a COBOL expert :-) Seriously usually this kind of opinion comes from people who do not know COBOL well. COBOL is a general purpose language with many attractive features, and is perfectly suitable for writing compilers. In our case, one of the really big advantages in writing the COBOL compiler in COBOL was speed, the Realia COBOL compiler is far far faster than other compilers around for the PC. To give an idea of the speed, on a 25MHz 386, the compiler (about 120K Sloc) would bootstrap in under two minutes. Of course on a modern fast PC, running perhaps 40 times faster, that should be down to well under 10 seconds (I have not run it recently). That kind of speed is welcome when developing large programs such as a compiler :-) Robert Dewar