MY MEMORIES

Charles Glenn Petersen

1972 - Missouri Years I

Northwest Missouri State University (continued)

As soon as I started studying Computer Science, I became interested in programming languages and eventually leading to the study of what was called a Compiler. A Compiler is a computer program that takes as input programs written in a computer language, such as FORTRAN and COBOL, checks its syntax and then translates the program into a language that the computer can understand and thus to perform the desired actions.

As part of my advanced learning of COBOL I wrote a translator for a simple 10 statement language we were teaching beginning students to learn rudimentary computer programing. This got me started on a much larger project to write a compiler for a simple 10 statement version of FORTRAN called TENFOR. This was to help beginning students learn programming without getting bogged down in all the minutia of the full blown FORTRAN language.