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The first Fortran competed with handcrafted code on extremely limited machines so it had to be almost as good to gain any traction. It did help that Fortran at
by kryptiskt 12y ago
The first Fortran competed with handcrafted code on extremely limited machines so it had to be almost as good to gain any traction. It did help that Fortran at that time was a barebones language so the translation was pretty straightforward.
http://polaris.cs.uiuc.edu/publications/c1070.pdf http://polaris.cs.uiuc.edu/publications/c1070.pdf
- acqq 12y agoThanks a lot kryptiskt. It's exactly the article I needed as the reference. For those who haven't seen what's behind your link, it's called "The FORTRAN I Compiler" and is written by David Padua in 2000. The must-read.
- cbsmith 12y agoIt may have also helped that processor designs were also incredibly simple and the typical demands of a modern optimizer bear almost no resemblance to the demands of a compiler back then.