[TUHS] Knuth and Unix

[Steve Johnson]

One connection Knuth had to Unix was inventing LALR parsing, the basic
algorithm used in Yacc.  I added some things (notably, the precedence
mechanism) and had to do a lot of engineering to be able to handle
large grammars (e.g. F77) on a PDP-11.  But the underlying algorithm
(taught to my be Al Aho) was all Knuth.

I seem to recall also that a lot of us at that time were underwhelmed
by The Art of Computer Programming, especially the use of MIX. 
Perhaps it just meant that Knuth was doing things bottom up, while we
were doing amazing things in small spaces with B and C.

Steve

----- Original Message -----
From: arnold at skeeve.com
To:<ecashin at noserose.net>, <dave at horsfall.org>
Cc:<tuhs at tuhs.org>
Sent:Thu, 10 Jan 2019 00:39:28 -0700
Subject:Re: [TUHS] Knuth and Unix

 Ed Cashin <ecashin at noserose.net> wrote:

 > Knuth is great, and I too am interested to know about his influence
on
 > UNIX, but Hoare is credited with the quicksort algorithm by the
 > authorities I've encountered.

 Hoare did indeed invent it. He describes the history, IIRC, in his
Turing Award
 lecture. (I know I read it, written by him, somewhere.)

 Arnold


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