From: stewart at serissa.com (Lawrence Stewart)
Subject: [COFF] Happy birthday, Niklaus Wirth!
Date: Fri, 15 Feb 2019 09:13:31 -0500 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <02A89727-5B08-4BB4-A139-AB55AD4EEF27@serissa.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <DA894FDF-A28C-49AB-A49C-D262BDBFC887@bitblocks.com>
[-- Warning: decoded text below may be mangled, UTF-8 assumed --]
[-- Attachment #1: Type: text/plain, Size: 1736 bytes --]
> On 2019, Feb 15, at 1:46 AM, Bakul Shah <bakul at bitblocks.com> wrote:
>
> On Feb 14, 2019, at 10:08 PM, Dave Horsfall <dave at horsfall.org> wrote:
>>
>> Almost forgot...
>>
>> Born on this day in 1934, he pretty much invented ALGOL (and algorithmic languages in general; the running joke was that you could call him by name or by value)... From Clem Cole: "The actual joke was Europeans called him by name ("ni-klaus vurt") and Americans by value ("nickel-less worth").
>
> Niklaus Wirth did come up with Algol-W, based on Algol-60 but he
> didn't invent Algol-58 or Algol-60 or Algol-68; though he was on
> the IFIP Working Group 2.1 for Algol (IIRC, he thought Algol-68
> was overly complicated).
>
> BTW, Niklaus Wirth himself supposedly made this self-referential joke:
>
> “Whereas Europeans generally pronounce my name the right way
> (‘Nick-louse Veert’), Americans invariably mangle it into
> ‘Nickel’s Worth.’ This is to say that Europeans call me by
> name, but Americans call me by value.”
>
> [I haven't found a primary source for this but lots of secondary
> sources and variations!]
> _______________________________________________
> COFF mailing list
> COFF at minnie.tuhs.org
> https://minnie.tuhs.org/cgi-bin/mailman/listinfo/coff
In addition to Algol-W and Pascal. Niklaus Wirth also developed Modula-2 and Oberon.
Oberon is particularly interesting because it included a language, an operating system, and a computer. There aren’t that many folks who could build a complete environmnet from scratch.
A good bit of the Oberon work was done by Jurg Gutknecht but it is nevertheless an impressive achievement. In 2013, Wirth put out a rebooted system running on an FPGA.
-L
next prev parent reply other threads:[~2019-02-15 14:13 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 5+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2019-02-15 6:08 dave
2019-02-15 6:46 ` bakul
2019-02-15 14:13 ` stewart [this message]
2019-02-15 23:13 ` cym224
2019-02-15 9:17 ` mutiny.mutiny
Reply instructions:
You may reply publicly to this message via plain-text email
using any one of the following methods:
* Save the following mbox file, import it into your mail client,
and reply-to-all from there: mbox
Avoid top-posting and favor interleaved quoting:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posting_style#Interleaved_style
* Reply using the --to, --cc, and --in-reply-to
switches of git-send-email(1):
git send-email \
--in-reply-to=02A89727-5B08-4BB4-A139-AB55AD4EEF27@serissa.com \
--to=coff@minnie.tuhs.org \
/path/to/YOUR_REPLY
https://kernel.org/pub/software/scm/git/docs/git-send-email.html
* If your mail client supports setting the In-Reply-To header
via mailto: links, try the mailto: link
Be sure your reply has a Subject: header at the top and a blank line
before the message body.
This is a public inbox, see mirroring instructions
for how to clone and mirror all data and code used for this inbox;
as well as URLs for NNTP newsgroup(s).