|
From: | Paul Eggert |
Subject: | Re: My plans for Bison: history |
Date: | Wed, 13 Feb 2019 18:15:14 -0800 |
User-agent: | Mozilla/5.0 (X11; Linux x86_64; rv:60.0) Gecko/20100101 Thunderbird/60.5.0 |
On 2/13/19 5:51 PM, Eric S. Raymond wrote:
One of my old blog posts implies that I used to believe it was 1970. I don't remember believing any year but 1973
Johnson said in a 2008 interview <https://www.computerworld.com/article/2534739/app-development/yacc--unix--and-advice-from-bell-labs-alumni-stephen-johnson.html> that he wrote Yacc after adopting the B compiler, which by then was an orphan; but he later says that Dennis Ritchie was still actively working on B while he was working on Yacc, so it's not clear how "orphan" B was by then. Maybe he is referring to Ritchie's work on "New B" (1971-1972) while he maintained the older B compiler. If so, I'd say that Yacc started development closer to 1970 than 1973.
After writing all the above, I looked at Ritchie's history of C <http://www.bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/chist.html>, which dates the first version of Yacc by 1971 or so (1970 is also plausible).
You could write Johnson and ask; see <http://yaccman.com/>.
[Prev in Thread] | Current Thread | [Next in Thread] |