From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: stewart at serissa.com (Lawrence Stewart) Date: Fri, 15 Feb 2019 09:13:31 -0500 Subject: [COFF] Happy birthday, Niklaus Wirth! In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: <02A89727-5B08-4BB4-A139-AB55AD4EEF27@serissa.com> > On 2019, Feb 15, at 1:46 AM, Bakul Shah wrote: > > On Feb 14, 2019, at 10:08 PM, Dave Horsfall 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