Re: Universal Compiler

On 2/10/2025 1:09 PM, Waldek Hebisch wrote:

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

Thanks for the additional information. When I met and talked with Standish, at CMU, it was just a little after he was told his orals and dissertation were accepted and he was now Dr. S! I remember he was so excited he treated me to dinner. I also remember him called Tim - I was startled when I saw his name as Thomas. I'm wondering if I am confused or that is actually his nickname.
I didn't meet Fisher at CMU; rather I bumped into him when he was a program manager at the DARPA IPTO office. When I told him I had read his dissertation and found it fascinating and a really good first hack at a horribly hard problem. He was excited and all smiley. He said that I was the first person not connected with CMU who he had met and who had read it. I thought that was a tragedy; it was the first near comprehensive work on a very important subject that I know about.
--
Jeff Barnett