Re: My plans for Bison: history

[Paul Eggert]

On 2/13/19 5:51 PM, Eric S. Raymond wrote:
> One of my old blog posts implies that I used to believe it was
> 1970. I don't remember believing any year but 1973

Johnson said in a 2008 interview 
<https://www.computerworld.com/article/2534739/app-development/yacc--unix--and-advice-from-bell-labs-alumni-stephen-johnson.html> 
that he wrote Yacc after adopting the B compiler, which by then was an 
orphan; but he later says that Dennis Ritchie was still actively working 
on B while he was working on Yacc, so it's not clear how "orphan" B was 
by then. Maybe he is referring to Ritchie's work on "New B" (1971-1972) 
while he maintained the older B compiler. If so, I'd say that Yacc 
started development closer to 1970 than 1973.

After writing all the above, I looked at Ritchie's history of C 
<http://www.bell-labs.com/usr/dmr/www/chist.html>, which dates the first 
version of Yacc by 1971 or so (1970 is also plausible).

You could write Johnson and ask; see <http://yaccman.com/>.