From: Toby Thain <toby@telegraphics.com.au>
To: Dave Horsfall <dave@horsfall.org>,
The Eunuchs Hysterical Society <tuhs@tuhs.org>
Subject: Re: [TUHS] Happy birthday, John Backus!
Date: Sun, 2 Dec 2018 17:34:06 -0500 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <7942e6cc-177f-7155-f80f-80732da69d51@telegraphics.com.au> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <alpine.BSF.2.21.9999.1812030906220.52810@aneurin.horsfall.org>
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):
https://www.thocp.net/biographies/papers/backus_turingaward_lecture.pdf
--Toby
>
> Trivia: there is no way that FORTRAN can be described in any syntax; it
> is completely ad-hoc.
>
> -- Dave
>
next prev parent reply other threads:[~2018-12-02 22:34 UTC|newest]
Thread overview: 23+ messages / expand[flat|nested] mbox.gz Atom feed top
2018-12-02 22:17 Dave Horsfall
2018-12-02 22:34 ` Toby Thain [this message]
2018-12-03 1:32 ` Rob Pike
2018-12-03 4:11 ` Toby Thain
2018-12-03 4:27 ` Rob Pike
2018-12-03 13:10 ` John P. Linderman
2018-12-03 22:44 ` ron
2018-12-03 16:25 ` Clem Cole
2018-12-03 20:20 ` Paul Winalski
2018-12-03 20:37 ` Clem Cole
2018-12-03 20:46 ` Hellwig Geisse
2018-12-03 22:24 ` Paul Winalski
2018-12-03 23:00 ` Lawrence Stewart
2018-12-04 11:53 ` Tony Finch
2018-12-04 14:23 ` Clem Cole
2018-12-04 14:43 Noel Chiappa
2018-12-04 14:53 ` Clem Cole
2018-12-04 16:24 ` Tim Rylance
2018-12-04 16:53 ` Clem Cole
2018-12-04 17:46 ` Paul Winalski
2018-12-04 20:59 ` Paul Winalski
2018-12-05 17:49 ` Paul Winalski
2018-12-04 15:18 ` Toby Thain
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=7942e6cc-177f-7155-f80f-80732da69d51@telegraphics.com.au \
--to=toby@telegraphics.com.au \
--cc=dave@horsfall.org \
--cc=tuhs@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).