Re: [TUHS] RIP John Backus

On Mar 16, 2018, at 2:52 PM, Dave Horsfall <dave(a)horsfall.org> wrote: He atoned for designing FORTRAN, so to speak, by coming up with FP, one of the first functional programming languages (though he called it FP system). See his 1977 Turing Award lecture: https://doi.org/10.1145%2F359576.359579 IIRC, someone had posted an interpreter for FP to comp.sources.unix. Ah, here it is: Volume 20, Issue 50. https://groups.google.com/forum/#!msg/comp.sources.unix/O68WmHasQZ8/2v3_YuE… FP's clear inspiration was APL. It didn't succeed but it was quite influential for the field of functional programming languages. Though modern FPLs are lambda calculus based (Backus thought lambda calculus was too powerful and may lead to chaos). Backus was also involved in the design of Algol58 and Algol60, which is where he came up with BNF. There is an ancient grammar notation that is as least as powerful as BNF but it seems Backus was unaware of it. [Pāṇinian rules can describe languages larger than CFL but not as large as context sensitive languages]