The first compiler was written by Grace Hopper in 1952 while the Lisp interpreter was written in 1958 by John McCarthy's student Steve Russell. Writing a compiler seems like a much harder problem than an interpreter. If that is so, why was the first compiler written six-years before the first interpreter?
Why was the first compiler written before the first interpreter?
history;compiler;interpreters
Writing a compiler seems like a much harder problem than an interpreter.That might be true today, but I would argue that it was not the case some 60 years ago. A few reasons why:With an interpreter, you have to keep both it and the program in memory. In an age where 1kb of memory was a massive luxury, keeping the running memory footprint low was key. And interpreting requires a bit more memory than running a compiled program.Modern CPUs are extremely complex with huge catalogs of instructions. So writing a good compiler is truly a challenge. Old CPUs were much simpler, so even compilation was simpler.Modern languages are much more complex than old languages, so even compilers are much more complex. Old languages would thus have simpler compilers.