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Excerpt from A Preliminary Report on Cims Pl/I
CIMS PL/I is an implementation of a PL/I subset on the CDC 6600 computer. The subset is oriented towards compiler writing, and is sufficiently large so that the compiler itself could be conveniently written in it. The objective of this report is to set forth some of the more interesting aspects of the compiler and some of the conclusions that I drew from creating it.
I had several initial objectives when I decided upon this project. One of them was to create a compiler for a useful programming language. That goal has been achieved, though it is now less significant since CDC has also produced a PL/I compiler. A second objective was to learn about compiling techniques. Compilation of PL/I is sufficiently difficult so that if one can compile PL/Ione can probably compile anything. A third objective was to gain more understanding of the characteristics of complex programs. A fourth objective was to stimulate thinking about programming language design.
CIMS PL/I has been operational since October 1972 and consumed about three and a half calendar years and one and a half man years of work. Production of the original version of the compiler was essentially a one-person effort. Since the original version appeared, a number of extensions and improvements have been made, some of them by others. The compiler itself is written in PL/I, and was bootstrapped using the IBM 360 and the IBM F-compiler for PL/I.
There are two appendices to this report. Appendix A is the current user's guide to CIMS PL/I. Appendix B describes a collection of coding tricks that I found useful and that may be useful to others.
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