Well, you're obviously right. Godfrey DiGiorgi wrote: > On Jan 26, 2007, at 11:07 AM, Boris Liberman wrote: >>> Ok, geeky trivia time ... which came first, LISP or FORTRAN? And no >>> peeking at google.com... ;-) >> Godders, every progra-toddler knows that Fortran was the first >> symbolic >> programming language after machine code and assembly. Lisp came in the >> second ;-). > > LOL ... well, it's not quite that simple. :-) > > FORTRAN (FORmula TRANSlation) was a high level language effort for > numerical processing closer to human language for ease of use that > started at IBM in 1954 but was first published for commercial use in > 1957 ... prior to that, it was lab use only: in development by the > authors. By 1960-1961, it had been updated to FORTRAN II. > > LISP (algebraic LISt Processing) in its basic form was developed at > Dartmouth in 1956 and remained primarily a research language tool for > AI work, although shared and used at several different institutions, > until by 1960 a version conforming to Lisp1.5 had become the primary > dialect. > > So they were developed at about the same time, although from entirely > different motivations. Arguably, LISP was in use outside of its > original point of creation prior to FORTRAN being available for > anyone other than the authors to use and could be said to have been > "first", and just as strong an argument would state that FORTRAN's > original concept and design predated LISP by as much as two years. > > Fun stuff. Now to return to our regularly scheduled photo geekery.
For some reason it pops up in my memory (probably totally wrong though) that Lambda-calculus was invented circa 1948. But that's not the point. The point is though, that no other programming language invented thereafter wasn't as heavy as original fortran (I programmed a bit in fortran-4, what a cludge) and as elegant and light as lisp. Boris -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List [email protected] http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net
