Per Brinch Hansen's books on compilers

Author: sohkamyung

Score: 133

Comments: 22

Date: 2020-10-28 01:20:31

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hedgehog wrote at 2020-10-28 03:01:03:

This is great. His Edison language is an interesting early exercise in building the minimal language with good support for concurrency. Prior to this dump there much information about Edison online but now you can get the full write-ups and code:

http://pascal.hansotten.com/per-brinch-hansen/edison-a-multi...

interfixus wrote at 2020-10-28 05:30:45:

Thank you.

I am Danish, into coding, and living sort of just down the road from the quondam HQ of Regnecentralen where PBH worked, and yet I barely knew about the man, and much less his writings.

Also, everybody, do check out the entire site. Or _sites_, rather - there are subdomains, and the author present them as seperate constructs. Troves of stuff. Homepages like we used to know them before the world went bonkers.

emptybits wrote at 2020-10-28 05:23:24:

Great resource. Thank you. From his "Design of Edison" book:

"programming languages cannot be expected to support complex abstractions, but should instead make it reasonably convenient to adopt programming styles which use simpler concepts to construct the more complex ones"

This was in the context of demonstrating Edison's ability to express both safe and unsafe concurrency (pp. 16-17).

2sk21 wrote at 2020-10-28 07:58:42:

I'm really amazed to see this here - I was his student back in the 1980s when he was a professor at Syracuse University. I implemented the virtual machine for his language Joyce which a hybrid of Tony Hoare's CSP with a Pascal syntax. Great times!

Also I was his teaching assistant for the course based on this book for a few semesters.

hestefisk wrote at 2020-10-28 01:42:32:

Very nice find. One of the great Danish computer scientists.

pjmlp wrote at 2020-10-28 06:37:43:

Great, lots of interesting books for the digital library.

I advise his work on SoloPascal and Concurrent Pascal, for anyone that cares about safer systems programming and Go like concurrency (in the 70's).

DC-3 wrote at 2020-10-28 01:46:35:

Does anyone know if he has any works in Danish? I am learning the language and am fond of compiler engineering.

psykotic wrote at 2020-10-28 01:59:36:

I believe all his notable scientific works were in English. You can find some minor articles in Danish, e.g. this announcement of the RC4000 in an engineering periodical:

https://datamuseum.dk/w/images/d/da/Rc4000d.pdf

MaxBarraclough wrote at 2020-10-28 10:06:50:

So you'll learn to compile Edison and interpret Danish, concurrently?

(Sorry, couldn't resist.)

julian55 wrote at 2020-10-28 09:39:21:

I enjoyed reading some of these articles in Software Practice and Experience back in the 1980s and it's good to have another look today.

iamshs wrote at 2020-10-28 12:31:12:

That 1975 photo is in front of Taj Mahal, India.

rurban wrote at 2020-10-30 17:09:09:

About the JAVA’S INSECURE PARALLELISM book:

“The author examines the synchronization features of Java and finds that they are insecure variants of his earliest ideas in parallel programming published in 1972–73. The claim that Java supports monitors is shown to be false. The author concludes that Java ignores the last twenty-five years of research in parallel programming languages."

Not only Java, btw. It's an ongoing desaster.

folex wrote at 2020-10-28 09:39:55:

So many great books! Thank you.

Though I can't seem to find a PDF of 'Search for simplicity' :(

Mikhail_Edoshin wrote at 2020-10-28 12:50:42:

As far as I understand the book is a collection of essays and each essay has a separate PDF under the book cover image.

plinkplonk wrote at 2020-10-28 01:35:52:

Wow Thank You! I've been looking for the Pascal compiler book for a long time!

merelydev wrote at 2020-10-28 08:14:18:

Hi, these books look very interesting.Before I go ahead and try to read them I wanted to ask if they are still relevant today?

crististm wrote at 2020-10-28 14:22:42:

Only you can answer questions of relevancy wrt your topics of interest. Think about this for a second: relevancy for 'today' yields such a broad area that, I dare say, no one here or elsewhere will have a satisfying answer _for you_.

carapace wrote at 2020-10-28 15:31:24:

Relevant to whom?

merelydev wrote at 2020-10-28 17:59:04:

Relevant to Systems Programming Languages today, or even modern operating systems. Sorry my English is bad but basically are these books about general principles that don't get outdated.

carapace wrote at 2020-10-28 21:02:40:

Ah, I would say that, to some extent they are of historical, as opposed to practical, value. That is, if you just wanted to implement an OS using modern best practices then these works might not be as relevant as other, much more recent works.

However, many of the fundamental themes, principles, and considerations are unchanged in the intervening years, and often clearer in earlier, simpler systems. And you can find forgotten gems.

merelydev wrote at 2020-10-28 22:57:21:

Cool! Thank you for answering.

carapace wrote at 2020-10-29 15:03:53:

Cheers!