THE FIRST COMPILERA Compiler is a computer program (or a set of programs) that translates text written in a computer language (the source language) into another language (the target language). The original sequence is usually called the source code and the output called the object code. Commonly the output has a form suitable for processing by other programs, but it may be human – readable text files.Towards the end of the 1950’s, machine-independent programming languages were first proposed. Subsequently, several experimental compiler were developed. The first compiler was written by Grace Hopper, in 1952, for the A-0 programming language. The FORTRAN team led by John Backus at IBM is generally credited as having introduced the first compiler, in 1957.COBOL was an early language to be compiled on multiple architectures, in 1960.Early compilers were written in assembly language. The first self-hosting compiler which was capable of compiling its own source code in high- level language was created for Lisp by Hart and Levin at MIT in 1962. Since the 1970s it has become common practice to implement a compiler in the language it compiles, although both Pascal and C have been popular choices for implementation language. Building a self-hosting compiler is a bootstrapping problem- the first such compiler for a language must be compiled either by a compiler written in a different language, or (as in Hart and Levin’s Lisp compiler) compiled by running the compiler in an interpreter.
