1. 5
    Design of a Separable Transition Compiler ☶ pdf historical melconway.com
    kristof avatar via kristof 8 months ago | cached | 1 comment

This is the paper written by Melvin Conway in 1963 which introduced the term “coroutine” to the computing literature. A nice quote near the beginning:

That property of the design which makes it amenable to many segment configurations is its separability. A program organization is separable if it is broken up into processing modules which communicate with each other according to the following restrictions: (I) the only communication between modules is in the form of discrete items of information; (2) the flow of each of these items is along fixed, one-way paths; (3) the entire program can be laid out so that the input is at the left extreme, the output is at the right extreme, and everywhere in between all information items flowing between modules have a component of motion to the right.

  1.  

  2. 3
    kristof avatar kristof 8 months ago | link

    And near the end:

    If a fast compiler is desired more can be said. The front end of any fast, one pass compiler will be written with an assembler; that’s a corollary of the Seventy-five Percent Rule and some common sense about efficiency of compiler-generated code. Furthermore, the really fast compilers will have only one pass; that’s the result of an analysis of how much extra work must be done by a multi-pass compiler. Notice that a corollary of these two statements is that really fast compilers can be written only for source languages which permit one-pass compilation. This proposition ought to be taken into account by language designers.