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 17:13:10 PST Path: archiver1.google.com!postnews1.google.com!not-for-mail From: byhoe@greenlime.com (Adrian Hoe) Newsgroups: comp.lang.ada Subject: Re: The making of compilers Date: 1 Mar 2002 17:13:10 -0800 Organization: http://groups.google.com/ Message-ID: <9ff447f2.0203011713.2e37a282@posting.google.com> References: <5ee5b646.0203011135.12a13558@posting.google.com> NNTP-Posting-Host: 210.186.172.124 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=ISO-8859-1 Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit X-Trace: posting.google.com 1015031590 29474 127.0.0.1 (2 Mar 2002 01:13:10 GMT) X-Complaints-To: groups-abuse@google.com NNTP-Posting-Date: 2 Mar 2002 01:13:10 GMT Xref: archiver1.google.com comp.lang.ada:20678 Date: 2002-03-02T01:13:10+00:00 List-Id: dewar@gnat.com (Robert Dewar) wrote in message news:<5ee5b646.0203011135.12a13558@posting.google.com>... > 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 I remembered that I had worked on a COBOL project 10 years ago. I wrote a command parser entirely in COBOL for my company project, fMRP. This parser would parse business rules entered by its users. As I still remembered, it contained not less than 9K SLOC. I am not surprised that one can write a compiler using COBOL. :) -- Adrian Hoe -- http://adrianhoe.com