Re: Universal Compiler

In comp.lang.c++ Jeff Barnett <jbb@notatt.com> wrote:

 
At about this time - the 1960s - Alan Perlis, then department chair at
CMU, had two relevant PhD theses written by his students. The first, by
Tom/Tim Standish, introduced a set of data definition primitives claimed
to be able to define virtually any know structure type. These primitives
were used as output by language-specific macros that expanded data
declarations in some top level language.
 
The second thesis was by a fellow named Fischer (sp?) whose first name
I've forgotten. He defined a set of control primitives: think of
relations between pieces of computations. Once again these were to be
used to form the end result when macros were used to translate from some
high level language. It was assumed here (as was above) that some
hardware specific back end would turn these expansions either into code
(compiler) or into behavior (interpreter). Fischer built such an
interpreter.

Google finds:

David Allen Fisher,
Control Structures for Programming Languages, 1970
Alan Perlis, advisor

Thomas A. Standish,
A data definition facility for programming languages, 1967
Alan Perlis, advisor

Big pieces of basic technology that were missing included the binding
and visibility rules for names and the management of namespaces.
 
Wiki article on UNCOL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/UNCOL
ACM paper Part I: https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/368892.368915

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                              Waldek Hebisch