From owner-freebsd-newbies Sun Feb 14 17:57:34 1999 Return-Path: Received: (from majordom@localhost) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.8/8.8.8) id RAA12233 for freebsd-newbies-outgoing; Sun, 14 Feb 1999 17:57:34 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from owner-freebsd-newbies@FreeBSD.ORG) Received: from jason03.u.washington.edu (jason03.u.washington.edu [140.142.77.10]) by hub.freebsd.org (8.8.8/8.8.8) with ESMTP id RAA12228 for ; Sun, 14 Feb 1999 17:57:33 -0800 (PST) (envelope-from durang@u.washington.edu) Received: from goodall2.u.washington.edu (durang@goodall2.u.washington.edu [140.142.12.168]) by jason03.u.washington.edu (8.9.2+UW99.01/8.9.2+UW99.01) with ESMTP id RAA14980; Sun, 14 Feb 1999 17:57:28 -0800 Received: from localhost (durang@localhost) by goodall2.u.washington.edu (8.9.2+UW99.01/8.9.2+UW99.01) with ESMTP id RAA49146; Sun, 14 Feb 1999 17:57:28 -0800 Date: Sun, 14 Feb 1999 17:57:27 -0800 (PST) From: "K. Marsh" To: root@isis.dynip.com cc: freebsd-newbies@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: Very Strange Question In-Reply-To: <199902142103.AAA08919@isis.dynip.com> Message-ID: MIME-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: TEXT/PLAIN; charset=US-ASCII Sender: owner-freebsd-newbies@FreeBSD.ORG Precedence: bulk X-Loop: FreeBSD.org 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