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Mark Miller
Just to add to Sergey's answer, my understanding is that Thompson wrote B in assembly, along with the first version of Unix, and then Ritchie wrote the first C compiler in B. C was written because B (which ran as an interpreted language) was going to be too slow to write system code that was needed to support Unix. Once C was written, large portions of Unix were re-written in C.
It seems like this word doesn't get used anymore, but back when I took my compilers course (in 1993), this process was called "bootstrapping," where successively higher level languages are written in lower level languages.
After the first C compiler was written, it was possible to write C compilers in C. So long as at least one C compiler exists, it will be possible to do this.
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Just to add to Sergey's answer, my understanding is that Thompson wrote B in assembly, along with the first version of Unix, and then Ritchie wrote the first C compiler in B. C was written because B (which ran as an interpreted language) was going to be too slow to write system code that was needed to support Unix. Once C was written, large portions of Unix were re-written in C.
It seems like this word doesn't get used anymore, but back when I took my compilers course (in 1993), this process was called "bootstrapping," where successively higher level languages are written in lower level languages.
After the first C compiler was written, it was possible to write C compilers in C. So long as at least one C compiler exists, it will be possible to do this.
See Questions On Quora
Continue reading...
