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