3 Dec
2018
3 Dec
'18
2:32 a.m.
Fortran was a marvel. Don't judge it by today's ideas about language design.
-rob
On Mon, Dec 3, 2018 at 9:34 AM Toby Thain <toby(a)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