Geoffrey S. Mendelson wrote:
Jean-David Beyer wrote:
Another way of looking at your statement would be if you thought I meant a
language in which to write operating systems. I think it would be possible
to do it in BASIC, but I sure would not want to try it. I know ALGOL 60
compilers were written in ALGOL 60, even though it was by no means ideal to
do so.

Not always. The Burroughs machines of that era (late 1960's) were true
stack processors and Algol suited them perferctly. The same with the HP
3000 computers of the early 1970's which also used some variant of Algol
as their "machine language".

I taught a course in computer architecture where I worked and one of the
most interesting machines was the B5500 and its successors (and
predecessors, for that matter). I to not know what language their Algol-60
compiler was written in. What I thought ironic was that business users were
the biggest consumers of those Burroughs machines, and they tended to write
in COBOL in those days, which was by no means stack oriented.

The machine I used whose ALgol-60 compiler was written in Algol-60 was the
GE 635 and GE 645, which were not stack machines at all. The best Algol-60
compiler I know of was the Illinois Alcor compiler for the IBM 7090 series.
It was written in assembler, and was really a neat piece of code itself. It
compiled so fast it could be considered an "instantaneous" compiler in the
sense that if the input was from punched cards, it could compile something
like 10 cards per second and the card reader could read only about 150 cards
per minute, so it could compile as fast as it could read the input. It was
faster than our FORTRAN compiler, which I thought pretty good as FORTRAN was
meant to be easy to compile efficiently for a 704 type machine.

--
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