On Sun, Sep 6, 2009 at 2:03 PM, Rob Pike <robp...@gmail.com> wrote: >> Are you implying Doug McIlroy hadn't been taught about (and inevitably >> occupied by) Church-Turing Thesis or even before that Ackermann function and >> had to wait to be inspired by a comment in passing about FORTRAN to realize >> the importance of recursion?! This was a rhetorical question, of course. > > Doug loves that story. In the version he told me, he was a (math) grad > student at MIT in 1956 (before FORTRAN) and the discussion in the lab > was about computer subroutines - in assembly or machine language of > course. Someone mused about what might happen if a subroutine called > itself. Everyone looked bemused. The next day they all returned and > declared that they knew how to implement a subroutine that could call > itself although they had no idea what use it would be. "Recursion" > was not a word in computing. Hell, "computing" wasn't even much of a > word in math.
It's nice to know that it's a bit of lore that changes with each telling. > > Don't be Whiggish in your understanding of history. Its participants > did not know their way. > > -rob > >
