Alex Martelli <aleax@aleax.it>:
This reminds me of a long-ago interview with Borland's techies about how they had managed to create Turbo Pascal, which ran well in a 64K (K, not M-) one-floppy PC
Even more impressive was the earlier version of Turbo Pascal which ran on 64K Z80-based CP/M systems! I have great respect for that one, because in a previous life I used it to develop a cross-compiler for a Modula-2-like language targeting the National 32000 architecture. My compiler consisted of 3 overlays (for parsing, declaration analysis and code generation), wasn't very fast, and had so little memory left for a symbol table that it could only compile very small modules. :-( In hindsight, my undoing was probably my insistence that the language not require forward declarations (it was my language, so I could make it how I wanted). If I had relaxed that, I could have used a single- pass design that would have simplified things considerably. Greg Ewing, Computer Science Dept, +--------------------------------------+ University of Canterbury, | A citizen of NewZealandCorp, a | Christchurch, New Zealand | wholly-owned subsidiary of USA Inc. | greg@cosc.canterbury.ac.nz +--------------------------------------+