He wrote the whole ALGOL compiler in 1960 alone. During the first week (!) he first wrote the assembler. As written by one of the guys who developed another compiler, the Fortran one:
"Our compilers were both punched or cards and were the same size. We had written ours in STAR 0, the only assembler that Burroughs supported on the 205. It had been Dick Berman's first programming project. Our compiler took one hour and 45 minutes to assemble. The first week of don's project he spent in writing his own assembler. He could assemble his compiler in 45 minutes. We were green with envy. I am sure that don used only half the computer time that Lloyd and I used."
Btw they had no terminals there then, and all shared one computer:
"Our compilers were both punched on cards"
"There was only one 205 at the Pasadena Plant. It was primarily used to run the payroll. Lloyd and I were given top priority on the machine since real money was going to be given to Burroughs as soon as we successfully finished our compiler. Payroll had second priority and don was third."
TeX was written by Knuth between 1978 and 1989, working on it for ten years and starting almost twenty years after his 1960 feat.
http://benchmarksgame.alioth.debian.org/u32/compare.php?lang...
The slowdown of most of these is 2 to 9 times, only one is comparable to C.
And I can imagine the difference when reimplementing the Knuth's code to be even bigger. For what Knuth did as early as in 1960 see here:
http://ed-thelen.org/comp-hist/B5000-AlgolRWaychoff.html#7
He wrote the whole ALGOL compiler in 1960 alone. During the first week (!) he first wrote the assembler. As written by one of the guys who developed another compiler, the Fortran one:
"Our compilers were both punched or cards and were the same size. We had written ours in STAR 0, the only assembler that Burroughs supported on the 205. It had been Dick Berman's first programming project. Our compiler took one hour and 45 minutes to assemble. The first week of don's project he spent in writing his own assembler. He could assemble his compiler in 45 minutes. We were green with envy. I am sure that don used only half the computer time that Lloyd and I used."
Btw they had no terminals there then, and all shared one computer:
"Our compilers were both punched on cards"
"There was only one 205 at the Pasadena Plant. It was primarily used to run the payroll. Lloyd and I were given top priority on the machine since real money was going to be given to Burroughs as soon as we successfully finished our compiler. Payroll had second priority and don was third."
TeX was written by Knuth between 1978 and 1989, working on it for ten years and starting almost twenty years after his 1960 feat.