From: Bakul Shah <bakul@bitblocks.com>
To: Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com>
Cc: The Eunuchs Hysterical Society <tuhs@tuhs.org>
Subject: Re: [TUHS] In memoriam: John Backus
Date: Sat, 16 Mar 2019 19:16:32 -0700 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <20190317021639.7E5D5156E40C@mail.bitblocks.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: Your message of "Sat, 16 Mar 2019 18:05:52 -0700." <20190317010552.GF1493@mcvoy.com>
On Sat, 16 Mar 2019 18:05:52 -0700 Larry McVoy <lm@mcvoy.com> wrote:
> Fortran is sort of yucky but as Clem has said, it continues to pay the bills.
> That's some staying power.
>
> I am with you that it is ironic that he gave us BNF as well. One wonders
> if he did that as a result of doing Fortran.
He did FP as a result of doing Fortran. In an interview by
Grady Booch he says
Well, it was just trying to be at a higher level so that
you didn't have to get into all those gory details and
stuff. Basically, the idea was to try to describe the
transformation that you wanted to take place, rather than
how to do it. It evolved very slowly and peculiarly.
But he said ultimately his effort failed because he couldn't see
how to deal with real time. Something he worked on for years.
> On Sun, Mar 17, 2019 at 12:02:39PM +1100, Dave Horsfall wrote:
> > We lost computer pioneer John Backus on this day in 2007; amongst other
> > things he gave us FORTRAN (yuck!) and BNF, which is ironic, really, because
> > FORTRAN has no syntax to speak of.
> >
> > -- Dave
prev parent reply other threads:[~2019-03-17 2:17 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 3+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2019-03-17 1:02 Dave Horsfall
2019-03-17 1:05 ` Larry McVoy
2019-03-17 2:16 ` Bakul Shah [this message]
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