[TUHS] RIP John Backus

[Tim Bradshaw]

On 18 Mar 2018, at 18:51, Paul Winalski <paul.winalski at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> 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.

They probably could not have read it: if I'm right, the draft specification for FORTRAN was 1954, with the manual and an implementation following in October 1956 & April 1957.  The Chomsky hierarchy was described by Chomsky in 1956.  So they got FORTRAN 'wrong' because no-one knew what 'right' was, or how it differed from 'wrong' at the point they had to decide what the syntax was going to be.

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