12 Jun
2019
12 Jun
'19
9:31 p.m.
Bud Lawson, long an expat living in Sweden, died yesterday. Not a
Unix person, he was, however, the originator of a characteristic Unix
programmer's idiom.
Using an idea adapted from Ken Knowlton, Bud invented the pointer-
chasing arrow operator that Dennis Ritchie adopted for C. I played
matchmaker. When Bud first proposed the "based storage" (pointer)
facility for PL/I, he used the well-established field(pointer)
notation. I introduced him to the pointer-chasing notation Knowlton
devised for L6. Knowlton, however, had no operator because he had only
single-letter identifiers. What we now write as a->b->c, Knowlton wrote
as abc. Appreciating the absence of parentheses, Bud came up with the
wonderfully intuitive pointer->field notation.
Doug