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From: anton@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at (Anton Ertl)
Newsgroups: comp.lang.c,comp.compilers
Subject: Re: 40 year old compilers
Date: Wed, 05 Jun 2013 16:22:51 GMT
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glen herrmannsfeldt <gah@ugcs.caltech.edu> writes:
>So, I wonder (cross post replies) about favorite 40 year old compiler
>books, especially if written using C-like languages

I like [wulf+75]; however, that's mostly about optimizing, and I don't
think that C compilers of that time had serious ambitions in that
direction.

Given that C compilers from 1973 came from Bell Labs, and Al Aho
worked at Bell Labs, the books he coauthored around that time might
fit the bill.

@Book{wulf+75,
  author = 	 {William Wulf and Richard K. Johnsson and Charles
                  B. Weinstock and Steven O. Hobbs and Charles M. Geschke},
  title = 	 {The Design of an Optimizing Compiler},
  publisher = 	 {Elsvier},
  year = 	 {1975},
  isbn =	 {0-444-0164-6},
  annote =	 {Describes a complete Bliss/11 compiler for the
                  PDP-11.  It uses some interesting techniques: it
                  uses a (hand-constructed) tree parsing automaton for
                  parts of the code selection (Section~3.4); it
                  optimizes the use of unary complement operators
                  (Section~3.3); it uses a smart scheme to represent
                  a conservative approximation of the lifetime of
                  variables in constant space and uses that for
                  register allocation (Sections~4.1.3 and~4.3).}
}

- anton
--
M. Anton Ertl
anton@mips.complang.tuwien.ac.at
http://www.complang.tuwien.ac.at/anton/