Look in John Cocke and Jacob T. Schwartz. Programming languages and their compilers. 2nd revised edition. New York: Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences, New York University, 1970.
We all "would have guessed" [and I at least would have liked to believe] that other issues were more important than blank suppression, which, while less tractable than it would appear to be, is finally of no great intellectual interest. This book---It is unfortunately a little like von Neumann-Goldstine on game theory in not really being accessible to readers who are not wired to think mathematically---was just one of Cocke's many contributions; but it alone would have justified his Turing Prize. --jg On 10/6/12, Paul Gilmartin <[email protected]> wrote: > On Sat, 6 Oct 2012 18:53:03 -0400, John Gilmore wrote: >> >>If I were the deity symbol-table management would be more important >>than blank suppression; but, as John Cocke showed conclusively, this >>is not the case. It is almost a law of nature that intellectually >>interesting problems turn out in the end to be practicallly less >>important than humdrum housekeeping issues. >> > You've made that assertion before, and I was astonished before, as I > am this time. I can find a wikipedia article on John Cocke which > refers to a wikipedia article on the CYK algorithm, but none with > measurements supporting the assertion. Absent any informed > statement to the contrary, I must believe it, though I would have > guessed code generation/optimization -- common subexpression > elimination; operator strength reduction; etc. > > -- gil > > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- > For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, > send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN > ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to [email protected] with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
