META II:
Digital Vellum
in the Digital
Scriptorium
DOI: 10.1145/2697401

Article development led by queue.acm.org

Revisiting Schorre’s 1962 compiler-compiler.

BY DAVE LONG

SOME PEOPLE DO living history—reviving older skills and material culture by reenacting Waterloo or knapping flint knives. One pleasant rainy weekend in 2012, I set my sights a little more recently and settled in for a little meditative retro-computing, circa

1962, following the ancient mode of transmission of

knowledge: lecture and recitation—or rather, grace of living in historical times, lecture (here, in the French sense, reading) and transcription (or even more specifically, grace of living post-Post, lecture and reimplementation).

Fortunately, for my purposes, Dewey Val Schorre’s paper10 on META II was, unlike many more recent digital artifacts, readily available as a digital scan.

META II was a “compiler-compil-
er,” which is to say that when one sus-
pects a production compiler might
be a rather large project to write in as-
sembly—and especially if one were in
an era in which commercial off-the-
shelf, let alone libre and open source,
compilers were still science fiction—
then it makes sense to aim for an in-
termediate target: something small
enough to be hand-coded in assem-
bly, yet powerful enough for writing
what one had been aiming for in the
first place.

Just as mountain climbers during the golden age of alpinism would set up and stock a base camp before attempting the main ascent, and later expeditions could derive benefit from infrastructure laboriously installed by a prior group, the path to the language ecosystem we now use (cursing only on occasion) was accomplished in a series of smaller, more easily achievable, steps. Tony Brooker (who already in 1958 was faced with the “modern” problem of generating decent code when memory access will