Michael Lehman's Podcasting from SoftwareLand : The Podcasting Man since October 2004
Updated: 1/23/2007; 5:44:28 PM.

 

Subscribe to "Michael Lehman's Podcasting from SoftwareLand" in Radio UserLand.

Click to see the XML version of this web page.

Click here to send an email to the editor of this weblog.

userland@mikelehman.com - Michael Lehman: Manic Minute - Michael Lehman: Manic Minute

Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons License.

 
 

Wednesday, October 26, 2005

Blast from the past. . .

This week's blast-from-the-past is how I got started in the business of writing compilers.  The first machine I ever wrote a program for was the Ollivetti Programma 101 calculator. 

Link here on the blog to the Old Calculator Museum page about the Programma 101 including pictures: http://www.oldcalculatormuseum.com/c-programma101.html

The reason I mention this is that the first programming language I ever built was an interpreter, written for the PDP-8, that emulated the Programma 101.  Building that, in assembly language, was hard work.

 

Having done that, in 1972, when I ran into Meta-PI, a so-called "compiler-compiler" I got quite excited.  What Meta-PI, written by John O'Neil in 1986 while at RCA, http://hopl.murdoch.edu.au/showlanguage.prx?exp=5090

 did was accept a BNF (Backus Normal Form) description of the syntax of your desired language and generate a parser similar to the YACC tool on Unix.  But more importantly, and beyond just generating a parser, it allowed you to specify what textual output you wanted to generate at the terminal nodes of the language thus moving the output program from a simple parser to an actual compiler.  Using Meta-PI I was able to develop a parser and then new compiler in a matter of days.  It was compiler-writer heaven.

 

Podcast of the day. . .

Tables Turned

http://tablesturned.com/

 

This podcast focuses on helping independent musicians legally clear their music for podcast use.

 

Manic Minute recommendation: Knowledge is power, use it wisely!

 

And that's your Manic Minute for October 26th, 2005!


3:38:45 PM    comment []

© Copyright 2007 Michael Lehman.



Click here to visit the Radio UserLand website.
 


Softwareland is a part of the TechPodcasts.com family of podcasts:

October 2005
Sun Mon Tue Wed Thu Fri Sat
            1
2 3 4 5 6 7 8
9 10 11 12 13 14 15
16 17 18 19 20 21 22
23 24 25 26 27 28 29
30 31          
Sep   Dec