[COFF] Happy birthday, Niklaus Wirth!

[Lawrence Stewart]

> On 2019, Feb 15, at 1:46 AM, Bakul Shah <bakul at bitblocks.com> wrote:
> 
> On Feb 14, 2019, at 10:08 PM, Dave Horsfall <dave at horsfall.org> wrote:
>> 
>> Almost forgot...
>> 
>> Born on this day in 1934, he pretty much invented ALGOL (and algorithmic languages in general; the running joke was that you could call him by name or by value)...  From Clem Cole: "The actual joke was Europeans called him by name ("ni-klaus vurt") and Americans by value ("nickel-less worth").​
> 
> Niklaus Wirth did come up with Algol-W, based on Algol-60 but he
> didn't invent Algol-58 or Algol-60 or Algol-68; though he was on
> the IFIP Working Group 2.1 for Algol (IIRC, he thought Algol-68
> was overly complicated).
> 
> BTW, Niklaus Wirth himself supposedly made this self-referential joke:
> 
>  “Whereas Europeans generally pronounce my name the right way
>  (‘Nick-louse Veert’), Americans invariably mangle it into
>  ‘Nickel’s Worth.’ This is to say that Europeans call me by
>  name, but Americans call me by value.”
> 
> [I haven't found a primary source for this but lots of secondary
> sources and variations!]
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In addition to Algol-W and Pascal. Niklaus Wirth also developed Modula-2 and Oberon.
Oberon is particularly interesting because it included a language, an operating system, and a computer.  There aren’t that many folks who could build a complete environmnet from scratch.
A good bit of the Oberon work was done by Jurg Gutknecht but it is nevertheless an impressive achievement.  In 2013, Wirth put out a rebooted system running on an FPGA.

-L