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From: grunwald@foobar.colorado.edu (Dirk Grunwald)
Newsgroups: comp.compilers
Subject: Re: DEC optimising Modula-2 compiler
Keywords: modula
Message-ID: <1990Jun6.145711.1434@esegue.segue.boston.ma.us>
Date: 6 Jun 90 14:57:11 GMT
References: <1990Jun1.193655.5436@esegue.segue.boston.ma.us>
Sender: compilers-sender@esegue.segue.boston.ma.us
Reply-To: grunwald@foobar.colorado.edu (Dirk Grunwald)
Organization: University of Colorado at Boulder
Lines: 26
Approved: compilers@esegue.segue.boston.ma.us
In-Reply-To: jensting@diku.dk's message of 1 Jun 90 19:36:55 GMT

>>>>> On 1 Jun 90 19:36:55 GMT, jensting@diku.dk (Jens Tingleff) said:
JT> Does anyone have any experience with/information about the 
JT> "portable optimising compiler for Modula-2" described in an article
JT> by Michael L. Powell in SIGPLAN Notices 19:6 (the compiler/article
JT> refered to in the Dragon book) ?

Whilest employeed at DEC-ERL one summer, Bill Bush & I beat (slightly) on this
compiler. I translated the internal tree representation into common lisp
lists, from which we were doing dataflow analysis for automatic
parallelization.

From my remembering, it was a very clean compiler internally (thank goodness),
much cleaner than e.g., Berkeley 'pc' & you could even understand the
optimization strategies. Amazing. Various small benchmarks showed that the
compiler did perform very well on VAXen.

Sadly, it all came to naught as DEC blew ERL out of the water that summer. You
can get a Modula-3 to C translator from gatekeeper.dec.com.  Don't know if
it's the same structure, though. 

Dirk Grunwald -- Univ. of Colorado at Boulder	(grunwald@foobar.colorado.edu)
						(grunwald@boulder.colorado.edu)
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