Re: [HACKERS] Historical trivia (was Re: First Major Open Source Database)

I am CC'ing Jolly and Andrew on this.  They may know the answer.

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> Thomas Lockhart <lockhart@alumni.caltech.edu> writes:
> >> It did not use any Ingres code, as told to me by Jolly, I think.  My
> >> book has Ingres mentioned as an "ancestor" of Postgres.
> 
> > I suppose we could have figured this out ourselves, since Postgres was
> > originally written in Lisp, and afaik Ingres was always C or somesuch
> > traditional compiled-only code. We still see evidence of this in our
> > code tree with the way lists and parser nodes are handled.
> 
> It's clear from both the comments and remnants of coding conventions
> that the planner/optimizer was originally Lisp code, and was hand-
> translated to C at some point in the dim mists of prehistory (early
> 1990s, possibly ;-)).  That Lisp heritage is responsible for some of
> the better things about the code, and also some of the worse things.
> 
> But I'm not sure I believe that *all* of the code was originally
> Lisp.  I've never heard of a Lisp interface for yacc-generated
> parsers, for example.  The parts of the executor I've looked at
> don't seem nearly as Lispy as the parser/planner/optimizer, either.
> So it seems possible that parts of Postgres were written afresh in
> Lisp while other parts were lifted from an older C implementation.
> 
> </idle speculation>
> 
> Does anyone here still recall the origins of Postgres?  I'm curious
> to know more about the history of this beast.
> 
>             regards, tom lane
> 
> ************
> 


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