It is very interesting how many hardcoded magic numbers it has. No headers and d... | Hacker News

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		bumbada on March 11, 2021 \| parent \| context \| favorite \| on: Dennis Ritchie’s first C compiler (c. 1972) It is very interesting how many hardcoded magic numbers it has. No headers and defines because they did not existed yet?. The full compiler is super compressed. Hundreds of lines per file. It would be great if there was an explanation of the general idea of the design somewhere.

Cthulhu_ on March 11, 2021 [–]

I'm only seeing a few thousand lines of code, so I think it would fit in someone's head easily enough. Might be the numbers were on paper.

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