The first translator-like compilers were written in the late 1950's. Credit is given to FORTRAN as the first successfully compiled language. It took 18 person-years to develop the FORTRAN compiler because the language was being designed at the same time that it was being implemented, and since this was a first all around, the translation process was not well understood.
We can now design and implement compilers faster and better because (1) languages are better understood, (2) tools now exist for some of the phases of a compiler, and (3) data structures and algorithms are well-known for various compiler tasks.
By the late 1950's, computers and computer languages were proliferating. To create a compiler for N languages on M machines would require N * M programs if each were to be created separately. However, if the front-end of a compiler were to translate the source to a common intermediate language, and the back end of a compiler were to translate the source to a common intermediate language, and the back end of a compiler were to translate this intermediate language to the language of the machine, then (ideally) only N + M programs would be needed.
This was the philosophy behind UNCOL ( Sammet,1969 ), one of the first attempts at automating the process of compiler creation. UNCOL stood for Universal Computer-Oriented Language and was actually an intermediate language, not a compiler generator.
It proved difficult to design an intermediate language which was able to "capture" the variable aspects of different programming languages and different machines. This difficulty is still an issue in today's compiler tools. Front-end compiler generators began to appear in the early 1960's, and new generators continue to be created today.
Perhaps the best-known compiler tool is YACC, Yet Another Compiler-Compiler, written by Steve Johnson (1975). YACC was first created for the UNIX operating system and is associated with another tool called LEX ( Lesk and Schmidt, 1975 ) which generates a scanner, although it is not necessary to use a scanner generated by LEX to use YACC. Users can write their own scanners. LEX/YACC have been ported to other machines and operating systems.
Compiler tools whose metalanguages include attribute grammars began to appear in the late 1970's and 1980's. GAG ( Kastens et al., 1982) are based upon attribute grammar descriptions.
The PQCC ( Wulf et al., 1975 ) project and others have undertaken the difficult task of generating the back end of a compiler.