[TUHS] Happy birthday, John Backus!

[Toby Thain]

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
>