Rugxulo wrote:
Okay, somebody mentioned the Pastel compiler (Pascal-ish, compiled itself) that was the original basis for RMS' hacking. He wrote his own C frontend and that later became GCC proper.
http://gcc.gnu.org/wiki/History (first Google hit for "Pastel compiler", BTW) says different:
: Hoping to avoid the need to write the whole compiler myself, I obtained the : source code for the Pastel compiler, which was a multi-platform compiler : developed at Lawrence Livermore Lab. It supported, and was written in, : an extended version of Pascal, designed to be a system-programming : language. I added a C front end, and began porting it to the Motorola : 68000 computer. But I had to give that up when I discovered that the : compiler needed many megabytes of stack space, and the available 68000 : Unix system would only allow 64k. : : I then realized that the Pastel compiler functioned by parsing the entire : input file into a syntax tree, converting the whole syntax tree into a chain : of "instructions", and then generating the whole output file, without ever : freeing any storage. At this point, I concluded I would have to write a new : compiler from scratch. That new compiler is now known as GCC; none of the : Pastel compiler is used in it, but I managed to adapt and use the C front : end that I had written.
Somebody should also probably e-mail RMS to ask if he still has a copy of the sources around somewhere (interesting to me, at least, and I'm just vaguely curious!).
This somebody could be you.
Frank