Q: Current C compilers are written in C. What was the FIRST C compiler written in? -- PDP-11 assembly language. You can look at the sources in the early Unix archives, or.... -- From: Dennis Ritchie <dmr(a)bell-labs.com> Newsgroups: comp.lang.c,comp.std.c,alt.folklore.computers Subject: A primeval C compiler Date: Thu, 29 Jul 1999 06:43:22 +0100 Organization: Bell Labs, Lucent Technologies Lines: 12 Message-ID: <379FE9FA.7D08(a)bell-labs.com> Reply-To: dmr(a)bell-labs.com NNTP-Posting-Host: cebu.cs.bell-labs.com Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=us-ascii Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit X-Mailer: Mozilla 3.01 (Win95; U) Xref: news.apple.com comp.lang.c:83397 comp.std.c:9285 alt.folklore.computers:33793 I finally prepared another fossil for museum exhibition: from DECtapes written in 1972-73, there are exhumed C compilers (including source) to show what the very early stages of the language were like. This was a highly transitional stage; for example, the earlier one anticipates a "long" type, but doesn't have struct; the 6-months-later compiler implements struct, but reuses long's slot in the type table. http://www.cs.bell-labs.com/~dmr/primevalC.html Dennis