From owner-sc22wg5@open-std.org Tue Mar 20 02:40:27 2007 Return-Path: X-Original-To: sc22wg5-dmo6 Delivered-To: sc22wg5-dmo6@open-std.org Received: by open-std.org (Postfix, from userid 521) id 1C2FC4CE31; Tue, 20 Mar 2007 02:40:27 +0000 (UTC) X-Original-To: sc22wg5@open-std.org Delivered-To: sc22wg5@open-std.org X-Greylist: delayed 309 seconds by postgrey-1.18 at pingo.cv.ihk.dk; Tue, 20 Mar 2007 02:40:26 UTC Received: from mtiwmhc12.worldnet.att.net (mtiwmhc12.worldnet.att.net [204.127.131.116]) by open-std.org (Postfix) with ESMTP id 2BE641B69C for ; Tue, 20 Mar 2007 02:40:18 +0000 (UTC) Received: from [192.168.100.183] (unknown[209.12.18.90]) by worldnet.att.net (mtiwmhc12) with ESMTP id <20070320023507112004gadbe>; Tue, 20 Mar 2007 02:35:07 +0000 Message-ID: <45FF4859.4030006@att.net> Date: Mon, 19 Mar 2007 21:35:05 -0500 From: Dick Hendrickson User-Agent: Thunderbird 1.5.0.10 (Windows/20070221) MIME-Version: 1.0 To: wg5 Subject: John Backus 1924-2007 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 7bit Sender: owner-sc22wg5@open-std.org Precedence: bulk I saw this on comp.lang.fortran today Dick Hendrickson http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Backus http://www.nytimes.com/2007/03/19/obituaries/20cnd-backus.html 'John W. Backus, who assembled and led the I.B.M. team that created Fortran, the first widely used programming language, which helped open the door to modern computing, died on Saturday at his home in Ashland, Ore. He was 82.' [...] 'Fortran changed the terms of communication between humans and computers, moving up a level to a language that was more comprehensible by humans. So Fortran, in computing vernacular, is considered the first successful higher-level language. Mr. Backus and his youthful team, then all in their 20s and 30s, devised a programming language that resembled a combination of English shorthand and algebra. Fortran, short for Formula Translator, was very similar to the algebraic formulas that scientists and engineers used in their daily work. With some training, they were no longer dependent on a programming priesthood to translate their science and engineering problems into a language a computer would understand. In an interview several years ago, Ken Thompson, who developed the Unix operating system at Bell Labs in 1969, observed that "95 percent of the people who programmed in the early years would never have done it without Fortran." He added: "It was a massive step." Fortran was also extremely efficient, running as fast as programs painstakingly hand-coded by the programming elite, who worked in arcane machine languages. This was a feat considered impossible before Fortran. It was achieved by the masterful design of the Fortran compiler, a program that captures the human intent of a program and recasts it in a way that a computer can process.'