The Shape of Code

I have been reading about the world’s first actual compiler (i.e., not a paper exercise), described in Corrado Böhm’s PhD thesis (French version from 1954, an English translation by Peter Sestoft). The thesis, submitted in 1951 to the Federal Technical University in Zurich, takes some untangling; when you are inventing a new field, ideas tend to be expressed using existing concepts and terminology, e.g., computer peripherals are called organs and registers are denoted by the symbol .

Böhm had work with Konrad Zuse and must have known about his language, Plankalkül. The language also has a APL feel to it (but without the vector operations).

Böhm’s language does not have a name, his thesis is really about translating mathematical expressions to machine code; the expressions are organised by what we today call basic blocks (Böhm calls them groups). The compiler for the unnamed language (along with a loader) is written in itself; a Java implementation is being worked on.

Böhm’s work is discussed in Donald Knuth’s early development of programming languages, but there is nothing like reading the actual work (if only in translation) to get a feel for it.

Update (3 days later): Correspondence with Donald Knuth.

Update (3 days later): A January 1949 memo from Haskell Curry (he of Curry fame and more recently of Haskell association) also uses the term organ. Might we claim, based on two observations on different continents, that it was in general use?