Albert Lai writes:
For almost a decade, most (I dare claim even all) Pascal and C compilers were "three-pass" or "two-pass". It means perhaps the compiler reads the input two or three times [...], or perhaps the compiler reads the input once, produces an intermediate form and saves it to disk, then reads the intermediate form from disk, produces a second intermediate form and saves it to disk, then reads the second intermediate form from disk, then it can produce machine code.
It must have been the obvious method, since even though it was obviously crappy [...].
I beg to differ. Highly modular software is not necessarily crapy if you're writing something as complex as a C or Pascal compiler -- especially in times where RAM existed only in miniscule amounts. A highly modularized algorithm for counting lines, words, and characters in an input file, however, is something altogether different. I doubt anyone but the most inexperienced novices would have tried to do that in three passes in a strict language. Peter