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The very first compilers were tediously written in assembly. Bill Gates wrote his first version of Basic in assembly. I believe all early Fortran compilers were
by sytelus 13y ago
The very first compilers were tediously written in assembly. Bill Gates wrote his first version of Basic in assembly. I believe all early Fortran compilers were written in direct machine code through punch cards! Coding in assembly is not all that bad :). Once you got some compiler going, you can write more complex compiler with it and keep adding more syntactic sugar :).
- GnarfGnarf 13y agoCoding in Assembly was a gas! I wrote applications in IBM BAL in the 70's. G/L, Payroll, Inventory. We did it in part because we had so little memory (typically 64K to 131K), we had to squeeze every drop we could out of available memory. I worked on Univac 9400s. We received the O/S in source code form (Assembly) on tape. We ran it through a parametizer (PROC), compiled the resulting source, and that's what the customer ran with. You haven't lived until you've stepped through your code one instruction at a time, displaying op codes and raw binary data on the maintenance panel lights.