2 Dec
2018
2 Dec
'18
11:34 p.m.
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