Early Programming Books

Brent Hilpert bhilpert at shaw.ca
Mon Jun 21 00:07:25 CDT 2021


On 2021-Jun-20, at 9:19 PM, ben via cctalk wrote:
> On 2021-06-20 9:01 p.m., Brent Hilpert via cctalk wrote:
>> On 2021-Jun-20, at 7:38 PM, ben via cctech wrote:
>>> On 2021-06-20 8:13 p.m., Toby Thain via cctech wrote:
>>> 
>>>> Tried the Shunting Yard algorithm? But watch out, it was invented by a
>>>> quiche eater...
>>> 
>>> The problem needs backtracking to generate correct code. Stack or muilti-register machines don't have this problem with temporaries.
>>> Ben.
>> The parser generates a tree of the algebraic expression, the tree is representative of the evaluation order of the expression, earlier evals lower in the tree, the node at the top is the last evaluated. Then walk the tree from the bottom up to generate code.
>> I think code to do this (efficient compiler code generation) has been done like a gazillion-billion times since 1960.
> 
> Computer science people seem to like to brag about how to parse.

Whatever that means.

> Walking a tree does not solve the tree was built in the wrong order.
 
No. If the tree was built in the "wrong order", then you screwed up in writing your parser.
There is no great difficulty in parsing into a tree representation which can be walked to resolve your initial issue.

> Parenthesis first implies input string re-scanning and text movement.

Whatever that means.
You don't have to "move text" to accomplish this.

> This what I can't seem to find a good algorithm for.

In summary fashion, I told you how it's done.
If you don't understand state machines and parsing that's your problem.

As it is, you are running into the same issue a thousand minicomputer & microproc manufacturers and designers ran into in the 60/70s: building and maintaining the support ecosystem for a machine architecture is not trivial.


But I should know better than to bother.



> FORTRAN II and IV did quite well before all this computer science. FORTRAN solved real world problems, ALGOL has yet to have I/O. LISP still can't be compiled.PASCAL is only educational problems, and C mutated into Monster. JAVA is not open source.
> 
> Very little new stuff is on multi-pass parsing.I have a 70's computer design of modest word length (20 bits) that needs 1970's computer science, and 64KB of memory and removable disks.
> Ben.



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