Randall R Schulz wrote:
On Tuesday 20 March 2007 14:15, M Harris wrote:
John Backus died today. He is the programmer in the 1950's
who pioneered high level programming languages by inventing the
Fortran language for the IBM 701.
More importantly (arguably), he gave us the notation we use to describe
virtually all computer languages (and not just programming languages,
but everything whose form is sequential and governed by rules that must
be formalized and whose recognition / validation automated), the
so-called Backus-Naur form.
I don't want to diminish BNF, but it doesn't describe a language,
"just" the context-free part of the syntax. (Not even the lexical
part.) Which is extremely important and was a major breakthrough,
not to diminish it.
IMO, full description of programming languages was eventually made
available by Donald Knuth's seminal work on attribute grammars,
which is the foundation of most semantic models of programming
languages. In fact, DEK once told me at a dinner that he considers
attribute grammars the sole scientific achievement that he has
really done, way beyond TACP.
Backus is also remembered for his work on functional programming
languages. His Turing Award lecture ("can programming be liberated
from the von-neumann style" or similar) is still worth a read, and
will get important again when we have 1,000s of cores in our future
processors.
Best,
Joachim
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Joachim Schrod Email: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Roedermark, Germany
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