Comments on: links for 2008-02-22 http://www.chipsquips.com/?p=999 A tiny spark of wit for a highly flammable world Fri, 14 Jun 2013 19:25:54 +0000 hourly 1 http://wordpress.org/?v=3.5.1 By: Sterling Camden http://www.chipsquips.com/?p=999&cpage=1#comment-117225 Sterling Camden Fri, 22 Feb 2008 20:15:26 +0000 http://www.chipsquips.com/?p=999#comment-117225 Sounds like fun. I’ve worked on a few compilers/interpreters myself, but never in less than 64KB. I’m assuming you had less, given the number of passes required.

]]> By: Ole Phat Stu http://www.chipsquips.com/?p=999&cpage=1#comment-117223 Ole Phat Stu Fri, 22 Feb 2008 19:55:22 +0000 http://www.chipsquips.com/?p=999#comment-117223 It was a Telefunken TR86, 18 bit word minicomputer (think german PDP). Fast drum though. Derived from the TR84 (gun-controller) and used as a channel controller for the TR440 mainframe
Man-sized wooden cabinet, would you believe.
Telefunken wanted to enter the commercial market and so ‘needed’
a Cobol compiler. The PL/1 compiler (later) was 9 passes.
Table-driven lex- and syntax- passes on both.
Otherwise did the compiler in a Macro-assembler :-)

]]> By: Sterling Camden http://www.chipsquips.com/?p=999&cpage=1#comment-117217 Sterling Camden Fri, 22 Feb 2008 17:48:59 +0000 http://www.chipsquips.com/?p=999#comment-117217 Ah, but writing the compiler has so much more geek status than using the language, especially when working with restricted hardware.

6-bit bytes? 3-byte words? What sort of machine was this?

]]> By: Ole Phat Stu http://www.chipsquips.com/?p=999&cpage=1#comment-117209 Ole Phat Stu Fri, 22 Feb 2008 17:06:34 +0000 http://www.chipsquips.com/?p=999#comment-117209 Confession : in ’69/70 I even wrote a COBOL compiler.

The target machine had such a tiny memory (of three 6-bit byte words) that it took 19 passes ;-)

]]>