From mboxrd@z Thu Jan 1 00:00:00 1970 From: paul.winalski@gmail.com (Paul Winalski) Date: Sun, 18 Mar 2018 14:51:02 -0400 Subject: [TUHS] RIP John Backus In-Reply-To: References: Message-ID: On 3/16/18, 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. > (Mis-)features such as the insignificance of white space made some sense when the target consumers for the language (numerical analysts) were accustomed to writing numbers with commas or spaces separating groups of digits (e.g., 1 234 567 and 1,234,567). Of course, that does lead to grammatical nasties such as the need for context-sensitive lexical analysis. I suspect that FORTRAN's syntax was designed before its creators had read any of the formal language work of Chomsky et. al., hence its poorly-behaved grammar. -Paul W.