[TUHS] Happy birthday, John Backus!

Dave Horsfall dave at horsfall.org
Mon Dec 3 08:17:30 AEST 2018


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?).

Trivia: there is no way that FORTRAN can be described in any syntax; it is 
completely ad-hoc.

-- Dave



More information about the TUHS mailing list