26 May
2021
26 May
'21
6:37 a.m.
And today, we understand parsing so well we don't need yacc.
-rob
On Wed, May 26, 2021 at 10:20 AM Nelson H. F. Beebe <beebe(a)math.utah.edu>
wrote:
The last article of the latest issue of the
Communications of the ACM
that appeared electronically earlier today is a brief interview with
this year's ACM Turing Award winners, Al Aho and Jeff Ullman.
The article is
Last byte: Shaping the foundations of programming languages
https://doi.org/10.1145/3460442
Comm. ACM 64(6), 120, 119, June 2021.
and it includes a picture of the two winners sitting on Dennis
Ritchie's couch.
I liked this snippet from Jeff Ullman, praising fellow list member
Steve Johnson's landmark program, yacc:
> ...
> At the time of the first Fortran compiler, it took several
> person-years to write a parser. By the time yacc came around,
> you could do it in an afternoon.
> ...
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