Date: Sun, 14 Feb 1999 17:57:27 -0800 (PST) From: "K. Marsh" <durang@u.washington.edu> To: root@isis.dynip.com Cc: freebsd-newbies@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Very Strange Question Message-ID: <Pine.A41.4.05.9902141744440.49272-100000@goodall2.u.washington.edu> In-Reply-To: <199902142103.AAA08919@isis.dynip.com>
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On Mon, 15 Feb 1999 root@isis.dynip.com wrote: > Ok, we all know that famous debate about who came first, the chicken or > the egg, on a similar scale, now you compile any c program with a > compiler, right , like cc, so as to say, cc compiler itself is a > program, so how it was first compiled, something like MS debug under > dos, or what. I mean the FIRST ever compiler generated, how it was > compiled into an exceutable ? O.K. Well let me begin by saying "I don't know". But you could just as easily ask about other things, like, "If a steel mill has steel equipment in it, where did the steel for the first steel mill come from?" I do know that the first home PC had no keyboard or monitor, but had a bunch of switches and lights on it. You had to use the switches to put in your program byte-by-byte, and if you screwed up, you had to start all over. These bytes I can only assume were in machine language - binaries. So what probably happened was, some guy wrote a compiler in machine language to compile the code of some slightly more sophisticated and intelligable language, and then someone used that language to write a compiler for yet another higher-level language, and so on, until one day Dennis wrote a C compiler and C was born. I don't know what language the first C compiler was written in. I sure hope it wasn't machine language, though. I guess the real meat in my answer is that the first compiler didn't need to be compiled, because it was written in a binary form that the computer could use without compilation or interpretation. Kenneth J. Marsh University of Washington durang@u.washington.edu Chemical Engineering To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-newbies" in the body of the message
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