Pascal not considered harmful - was Re: Rich kids are into COBOL

[Johnny Billquist]

On 2015-02-20 23:32, Ali wrote:
>> I'm not at all certain that such a skill is even marginally valuable
>> today.  Who codes much in assembly, much less machine code?  C has
>> firmly established itself in the once memory-constrained MCU world, so
>> not even there.
>
> Excuse my ignorance but then how is a compiler written? I always thought
> that you would need to know op codes and assembler to write a compiler. I.E.
> you can't write and efficient compiler by using a high level language.

While true, it is becoming less so, as most compilers today generate 
some intermediate code, and then you have a backend which is shared with 
many compilers, who is the part that actually deals with this.

And the people working on the backend is just a subset of the people 
working on compilers.

And even worse, nowadays, it is becoming popular to have C as the 
intermediate language, since you then already have a C compiler that can 
generate the machine code... So some compiler people never go any deeper 
than C...

	Johnny

-- 
Johnny Billquist                  || "I'm on a bus
                                   ||  on a psychedelic trip
email: bqt at softjar.se             ||  Reading murder books
pdp is alive!                     ||  tryin' to stay hip" - B. Idol