The compiler compiler

Tom Kilburn CBE FREng. 11 August 1921 – 17 January 2001

“…Work on high-level languages and compilers was led initially by R.A. Brooker and later by D. Morris. This included work on the 'Compiler-Compiler' (Brooker et al 1963), a system for the automatic generation of compilers.…”

A view of the origins and development of Prolog

“…Brooker and Morris in England and Irons in the United States had by this time suggested innovative approaches to compilation called syntax-directed translations. Brooker and Morris showed how recursive procedures obtained automatically from the grammar rules could parse a string in the language generated by the grammar [3,4]. Actions were then triggered whenever certain syntactic constructs were encountered while parsing.…”

The Manchester Mark I and atlas

“…The standard Atlas compilers were mostly implemented, using the Compiler Compiler [2], a formal language for the transparent description of syntax and semantics. While compilers for all the common highlevel languages such as Algol, Cobol, and Fortran were eventually written for Atlas, the Manchester users programmed extensively in Atlas Autocode to begin with.…”

“…Secondly the principal features are given, in describing which, some of the original terminology has been replaced by its nearest modern equivalent for the sake of readability. It should be stated, however, that any serious further study of the designs should start with the original papers quoted in [6]; a useful selection of these is [1,2,5,8,9,10]. Finally, each computer system is assessed according to its immediate and longterm impact.…”