[TUHS] Happy birthday, John Backus!

[John P. Linderman]

If you understood the architecture and instruction set of the IBM
709/7090/7094 series (I cut my programming teeth on the 7094), you
understood the "quirks" of Fortan: three way branches, indexing arrays in
reverse order, always executing a loop at least once, etc. Fortran
"tricked" the writer into producing code that worked well on those
machines, but was much easier to understand and modify than assembler. Not
all that different from C and DEC boxes, but the IBM machines were less
coherent.

On Sun, Dec 2, 2018 at 11:29 PM Rob Pike <robpike at gmail.com> wrote:

> To the author of the first message, the one who called Fortran an
> "obscenity".
>
> -rob
>
>
> On Mon, Dec 3, 2018 at 3:11 PM Toby Thain <toby at telegraphics.com.au>
> wrote:
>
>> On 2018-12-02 8:32 PM, Rob Pike wrote:
>> > Fortran was a marvel. Don't judge it by today's ideas about language
>> design.
>>
>> The 1977 lecture was by John Backus, not me, so I'm confused who that's
>> directed at.
>>
>> >
>> > -rob
>> >
>> >
>> > On Mon, Dec 3, 2018 at 9:34 AM Toby Thain <toby at telegraphics.com.au
>> > <mailto: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
>> >     >
>> >
>>
>>
-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: <http://minnie.tuhs.org/pipermail/tuhs/attachments/20181203/3607f820/attachment.html>