User:Yarq/Portable C Compiler
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The Portable C Compiler (also known as pcc) was an early compiler for the C programming language written by Stephen C. Johnson of Bell Labs in mid-1970s [1]. It was very influential at its time. According to Dennis Ritchie, the majority of C compilers was based on pcc in the beginning of 1980s [2]. It also had a long life span. For example, BSD was shipped with a port of pcc as late as in 1990 (it was 4.3BSD-Reno; then pcc was superseded by GNU C in 4.4BSD).
The keys to the success of pcc were its portability and diagnostic capabilities:
- The compiler was designed so that only a few of its source files were machine-dependent.
- It was robust to syntax errors and refused to compile invalid programs.
Both features were new in the days pcc was written.
In its turn, pcc borrowed some ideas from a portable C compiler by Alan Snyder, who wrote it in 1973 for his Master's Thesis at M.I.T. [3][4].
[edit] References
- Johnson, S.C. (1978). "A portable compiler: theory and practice". Proceedings of the 5th ACM SIGACT-SIGPLAN symposium on Principles of programming languages. Tucson, Arizona. pp. 97-104. Online reprint at ACM.
- Ritchie, Dennis M. (1993). "The development of the C language". The second ACM SIGPLAN conference on History of programming languages. Cambridge, Massachusetts. pp. 201-208. Online reprint.
- Snyder, A. (1975). "A Portable Compiler for the Language C". Master’s Thesis. M.I.T., Cambridge, Mass. Online reprint.
- Johnson, S.C. (1981). "A Tour Through the Portable C Compiler". Unix Programmer's Manual, 7th edition, Volume 2, ISBN 0-03-061743-X. Online version.
