[TUHS] RIP John Backus

Paul Winalski paul.winalski at gmail.com
Mon Mar 19 04:51:02 AEST 2018


On 3/16/18, Dave Horsfall <dave at horsfall.org> wrote:
> We lost computer pioneer John Backus on this day in 2007; amongst other
> things he gave us FORTRAN (yuck!) and BNF, which is ironic, really,
> because FORTRAN has no syntax to speak of.
>
(Mis-)features such as the insignificance of white space made some
sense when the target consumers for the language (numerical analysts)
were accustomed to writing numbers with commas or spaces separating
groups of digits (e.g., 1 234 567 and 1,234,567).  Of course, that
does lead to grammatical nasties such as the need for
context-sensitive lexical analysis.

I suspect that FORTRAN's syntax was designed before its creators had
read any of the formal language work of Chomsky et. al., hence its
poorly-behaved grammar.

-Paul W.



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