[TUHS] Happy birthday, John Backus!

[Rob Pike]

Fortran was a marvel. Don't judge it by today's ideas about language design.

-rob


On Mon, Dec 3, 2018 at 9:34 AM Toby Thain <toby at telegraphics.com.au> wrote:

> On 2018-12-02 5:17 PM, Dave Horsfall wrote:
> > As every computer programmer should know, John Backus was emitted in
> > 1924; he gave us the BNF syntax (he is the "B"), but he also gave us
> > that FORTRAN obscenity...  Yeah, it was a nice language at the time; the
> > engineers loved it, but tthe computer scientists hated it (have you ever
> > tried to debug a FORTRAN program that somebody else wrote?).
>
> He made amends by being early to recognise that problem, and propose
> solutions, in his 1977 ACM Turing Award lecture (still perfectly
> relevant today):
>
> https://www.thocp.net/biographies/papers/backus_turingaward_lecture.pdf
>
> --Toby
>
>
>
> >
> > Trivia: there is no way that FORTRAN can be described in any syntax; it
> > is completely ad-hoc.
> >
> > -- Dave
> >
>
>
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