What came first: A compiler or a code?

Is there a word for these binary option questions that don't allow any depth of thought?

*Found it online this question is a false dilema https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/False_dilemma

Does anyone else dislike this type of question, in a world of possibilities with a rich history only two options are given as possible answers. Like what came first the chicken or the egg, absurdly simplistic thinking the; answer is of course velociraptor.

 

people talking about mechanical computers:

28m 30s is real cool
mechanical boy figure that writes what u set it to

 

Does the human brain count as a compiler for language? Maybe that came first.

somewhere on topic....

Chicken or the egg? I think chicken since the egg is the offspring. And the question feels too obvious if you ask what came first : The parent or the offspring? Obviously the parent comes before the child! But maybe I oversimplified it.

 

Reading through the thread made me wonder...

How was the compiler compiled?

 

It compiled itself*. Current version compiles next version. "compiles itself" means it compiles new compiler binary from source (same thing as with normal program), not that it changes itself while it is running or something like that. Compiler also can compile new copy of current version from source, which may be useful if you wanted to toggle some optimization flags. If you ever tried to build linux system from source, you'd need to deal with something like that at some point.

The very first compiler was written in assembly.
The very first assmbler was written as pure machine code.

 

Manually of course. By human hands.

Why repeat wiki? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Self-hosting

But it's certainly possible! There is no difference between data and code. It's not an easy task though.

 

In the name of Cthulhu/because I can.

There is a difference, actually. now, my knowledge on the subject is a bit hazy, but.

Data and code may be placed in different CPU segments and may have different protection. If the code segment is write protected you can't self-modify. You can modify program being debugged, though, but usually that would require elevated/admin privilegies.

For detail google "protected mode" and "global destriptor table". Now, as far as I know, windows technically uses same segment for data and code (code is still write-protected, though), but this is not the case on linux system where code and data are separate and windows has DEP system.

So, by default, it is reasonable to expect that code sections are read-only and cannot be changed while program is running. Also, it is reasonable to expect data segment not to have "execute" permission.

 

During first compiler time there was no protected mode... And there were tons of tricks on self-modifying code in name of optimizations. Besides there are plenty of ways to workaround those protections. Simplest being is to run launcher, make compiler recompile itself and then launcher to launch new, recompiled code while saving context. Like Unity's hot reload. It'll be slower, but will work.

 

You are all wrong. The answer is of course....


42

 

But is that:

octal 42 = 34 dec
decimal 42 = 42 dec
hexidecimal 42 = 66 dec
ah = 42 when using the the DOS INT 21h function LSEEK 'seek file'

You're really not being clear here Douglas. Adam's not going to be happy!

 

Clearly it's vigesimal. After all everything mysterious has to involve Mayans.

 

I thought vigesimal was a vegetarian number base

 

That's the beauty of it. When run through the quantum probability sub-snarfalator, it's still...

42

 

Of course the code came first otherwise there would be nothing for the compiler (human or program) to compile. And long ago it was common for code to be hand compiled. In a sense human compilers who converted BASIC and other languages into lower level machine code. The higher languages themselves were generally interpreted on the fly.

Anyway, it was after a while of manually doing this kind of conversion that someone somewhere thought "you know we could write a program to automate this conversion process." Then compilers eventually became part of the norm for languages such as C and usually an option for BASIC as well. These days even the various BASICs are likely all compiled.

What a sense of awe it was back then to take a section of an interpreted BASIC program and manually compile it into machine code. Most of the time it ran thousands of times faster.