From: Paul Winalski <paul.winalski@gmail.com>
To: Clem Cole <clemc@ccc.com>
Cc: The Eunuchs Hysterical Society <tuhs@tuhs.org>
Subject: Re: [TUHS] Happy birthday, John Backus!
Date: Mon, 3 Dec 2018 15:20:59 -0500 [thread overview]
Message-ID: <CABH=_VTGj_Fugj7nNPu47G2nP2kjJivw-ummrWYnQe8tRtwqkQ@mail.gmail.com> (raw)
In-Reply-To: <CAC20D2Puu3x+2sbt+dCSrmJ_cLk_p8R-WnSPHOKhcGvxN5BsCg@mail.gmail.com>
I replied in detail to the child thread on it being impossible to
devise a formal grammar for Fortran before I saw this one (its
parent).
Of course one can write a grammar for Fortran using a formal system
such as BNF. It's just not going to be a well-behaved context-free
grammar such as one can do for C or Pascal, and you won't be able to
feed the grammar to lex and yacc, press a button, and have a compiler
pop out. Fortran was being devised at the same time that Chomsky, et.
al. were doing the research on formal languages. Essentially, Fortran
syntax was devised before computer scientists knew better. I suspect
COBOL has similar issues.
-Paul W.
next prev parent reply other threads:[~2018-12-03 20:21 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
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 [this message]
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
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