3 Dec
2018
3 Dec
'18
5:27 a.m.
To the author of the first message, the one who called Fortran an
"obscenity".
-rob
On Mon, Dec 3, 2018 at 3:11 PM Toby Thain <toby(a)telegraphics.com.au> wrote:
On 2018-12-02 8:32 PM, Rob Pike wrote:
https://www.thocp.net/biographies/papers/backus_turingaward_lecture.pdf
Fortran was a marvel. Don't judge it by
today's ideas about language
design.
The 1977 lecture was by John Backus, not me, so I'm confused who that's
directed at.
-rob
On Mon, Dec 3, 2018 at 9:34 AM Toby Thain <toby(a)telegraphics.com.au
<mailto:toby@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):
--Toby
Trivia: there is no way that FORTRAN can be described in any
syntax; it
is completely ad-hoc.
-- Dave