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Bridging the Language Gap

Grace Hopper and an early Univac.

Early computers did not use compilers, which are programs that translate text written in one computer language (the source language) into another computer language (the target language). Those relatively primitive early machines had just a few operations codes and little memory, and users entered binary machine code directly by toggling switches on the computer console/front panel.

In the late 1940s, programmers found that machine code could be denoted using some mnemonics (assembly language) and computers could translate those mnemonics into machine code. The primitive compiler known as assembler emerged.

U.S. Navy officer Grace Hopper is credited with doing much of the seminal work in the development of compilers when she worked on the Univac computer for Remington Rand Corp. in the early 1950s. She did this, she said, because she was lazy and hoped that "the programmer may return to being a mathematician.'' Her work embodied or foreshadowed enormous numbers of developments that are now the bones of digital computing: subroutines, formula translation, relative addressing, the linking loader, code optimization and even symbolic manipulation of the kind embodied in the Mathematica and Maple programming languages.

	John Backus

The Fortran team at IBM, led by the programming language's inventor, John Backus, is generally credited as having introduced the first complete compiler, in 1957. Cobol was an early language to be compiled on multiple architectures, starting in 1960. Most of the principles of compiler design were developed during the 1960s.

With the evolution of programming languages and the increasing power of computers, compilers are becoming increasingly complex in order to bridge the gap between problem-solving modern programming languages and the various computer systems, aiming at getting the highest performance out of the target machines.

Because compilers translate source code into object code, which is unique for each type of computer, many compilers are available for the same language. For example, there is a Fortran compiler for PCs and another for Apple Computer Inc.'s Macintosh computers. In addition, the compiler industry is quite competitive, so there are actually many compilers for each language on each type of computer. More than a dozen companies develop and sell C compilers for PCs.

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