I looked up John Backus on wikipedia and followed a link to ALGOL:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ALGOL_60
where the following "undesirable" property of call-by-name is mentioned.
"ALGOL 60 allowed for two evaluation strategies for parameter passing:
the common call-by-value, and call-by-name. Call-by-name had certain
limitations in contrast to call-by-reference, making it an undesirable
feature in language design. For example, it is impossible in ALGOL 60 to
develop a procedure that will swap the values of two parameters if the
actual parameters that are passed in are an integer variable and an
array that is indexed by that same integer variable. However,
call-by-name is still beloved of ALGOL implementors for the interesting
thunks that are used to implement it."
I suppose that call-by-name is still beloved of Haskell implementors as
well?
Dan Weston
[EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote:
John Backus, inventor of Fortran, Turing Award winner, and also an early
pioneer in functional programming, died Saturday at his home in Oregon.
Many of us have fond memories of him in the earlier days of our careers,
and we all owe a lot to him for giving credibility to functional
programming through his Turing Award lecture, "Can Programming Be
Libarated From the von Neumann style?" Here is an article from the New
York Times.
* BUSINESS * | March 20, 2007
* John W. Backus, 82, Fortran Developer, Dies
<http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/20/business/20backus.html?ex=1175054400&en=d76ca10764a7769f&ei=5070&emc=eta1>
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