Re: [TUHS] Happy birthday, C.A.R. Hoare!

[Paul McJones <paul@mcjones.org>]

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In the June 1966 CACM [1], Wirth and Hoare published "A contribution to the development of ALGOL”, which describes a language very similar to Algol W. In Wirth’s Turing Award lecture (published in the Feb 1985 CACM [2]) "From programming language design to computer construction”, he noted:

“The Working Group assumed the task of proposing a successor and soon split into two camps. On one side were the ambitious who wanted to erect another milestone in language design, and, on the other, those who felt that time was pressing and that an adequately extended ALGOL 60 would be a productive endeavor. I belonged to this second party and submitted a proposal that lost the election. Thereafter, the proposal was improved with contributions from Tony Hoare (a member of the same group) and implemented on Stanford University's first IBM 360. The language later became known as ALGOL W and was used in several universities for teaching purposes.”

In particular, Hoare’s work on “Record Handling” (see [3]) had a strong impact on Algol W and Wirth’s later languages.

[1] http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/365696.3657022
[2] http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/2786.2789
[3] http://www.softwarepreservation.org/projects/ALGOL/standards/.

> On Jan 10, 2019, at 7:06 PM, clemc@ccc.com wrote:
> 
> From: Clem cole <clemc@ccc.com <mailto:clemc@ccc.com>>
> To: Dave Horsfall <dave@horsfall.org <mailto:dave@horsfall.org>>
> Cc: The Eunuchs Hysterical Society <tuhs@tuhs.org <mailto:tuhs@tuhs.org>>
> 
> Dave. The w in Algolw was Wirth.  He was at Stanford at the time.  It was written in PL/360 btw.    The sources are googlable.  FWIW  Pascal was done a couple of years later with lessons learned from Algolw and reaction to Algol68.  
> 
> Sent from my PDP-7 Running UNIX V0 expect things to be almost but not quite. 
> 
>> On Jan 10, 2019, at 6:52 PM, Dave Horsfall <dave@horsfall.org <mailto:dave@horsfall.org>> wrote:
>> 
>> [Not sure whether this is more appropriate for COFF instead, so it's here; advice (apart from STFU) gratefully accepted.)
>> 
>> Sir Charles Antony Richard Hoare FRS FREng was born on this day in 1934; a computer pioneer (one of the greats) he gave us things like the quicksort algorithm (which became qsort() in Unix) and ALGOLW (a neat language).
>> 
>> -- Dave
> 


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