Re: beagle compiler

["Michael J. Mahon" <mjmahon@aol.com>]

mdj wrote:
> Michael J. Mahon wrote:
>
>
> > It was slow, but it was written in Applesoft and then compiled
> > using itself.  How many self-hosted compilers were there for
> > the Apple II?
>
>
> I would have thought most of the high level languages were... 

I doubt it.  Most were probably written in assembly language, or,
at best, cross-compiled.  (I don't count the IIgs, since that was
a 16-bit system from the point of view of compilers.)

In fact, there were *very* few high-level languages for the 8-bit
Apple II that generated object code (as opposed to an interpretive
code), and that approach, if followed in a simplistic way, leads
to a very slow compiler.  (As opposed to the Digitek approach, based
on SDS 940 POPs, which expanded speed critical POPs as macros, making
for a very fast, small compiler.)

> The Pascal compiler in Apple Pascal was self hosting, although because the
> OS itself was a collection of segment procedures one had to know what
> they were doing to replace it.
>
> Of course, since the P-system was portable, it would have made more
> sense to build the system on a larger computer than an Apple II :-)

And I supposed that that was how it was made.

BTW, if the Pascal system had been profiled, and critical parts macro
expanded, it could have been a *much* faster system.  Then, of course,
the tools to do that could have been made avaialable to users so that
they could speed up their applications considerably, too.

-michael

New, faster SUDOKU v2.0 solver for Apple II's!
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