

Who Came First: The Source Code or the Compiler? - Mojah
https://ma.ttias.be/who-came-first-the-source-code-or-the-compiler/

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informatimago
Lacking a mention of:
[https://www.ece.cmu.edu/~ganger/712.fall02/papers/p761-thomp...](https://www.ece.cmu.edu/~ganger/712.fall02/papers/p761-thompson.pdf)

And of the IBM 1401:
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_1401](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_1401)

The later is relevant, since as you can see from the opcode description on the
wikipedia page, the "source code" of an (assembler) program, as characters
punched on a card, had the exact binary representation of the machine code
executed by the computer. In effect, the source code was directly interpreted
by the hardware. Even if this source code being machine code was not close to
English like Cobol sources, or to Mathematics like Fortran sources, it was
still source code.

Hence the answer to the question: source code was there before the compiler
(beside, before compilers were assemblers and autocoders, that had also source
codes).

