From owner-sc22wg5 Thu Mar 21 12:28:27 2002 Received: from he101war.uk.vianw.net (he101war.uk.vianw.net [195.102.249.208]) by dkuug.dk (8.9.2/8.9.2) with ESMTP id MAA09096 for ; Thu, 21 Mar 2002 12:28:27 +0100 (CET) (envelope-from Miles@bluechiplearning.com) Received: from [195.102.204.12] (helo=[195.102.204.12]) by he101war.uk.vianw.net with esmtp (Exim 3.22 #5) id 16o0gS-00074F-00 for sc22wg5@dkuug.dk; Thu, 21 Mar 2002 11:24:41 +0000 User-Agent: Microsoft-Outlook-Express-Macintosh-Edition/5.02.2022 Date: Thu, 21 Mar 2002 11:25:40 +0000 Subject: Re: (SC22WG5.2330) Fortran archeology From: Miles Ellis To: Message-ID: In-Reply-To: <200203181907.UAA92023@dkuug.dk> Mime-version: 1.0 Content-type: text/plain; charset="US-ASCII" Content-transfer-encoding: 7bit The other day, in response to Mike Metcalf's email about "Fortran archaeology" I drew attention to John Backus' paper "The History of FORTRAN I, II, and III" at the ACM History of Programming Languages Conference held in Los Angeles June 1-3 1978. While tidying up some books today I came across the actual Pre-prints for that conference, which I thought I had lost. I thought that you all might be interested in some of his closing thoughts. "My own opinion as to the effect of FORTRAN on later languages and the collective impact of such languages on programming generally is not a popular opinion. ... I now regard all conventional languages (e.g., the FORTRANs, the ALGOLs, their successors and derivatives) as increasingly complex elaborations of the style of programming dictated by the von Neumann computer. These "von Neumann languages" create enormous, unnecessary intellectual roadblocks in thinking about programs and in creating the higher level combining forms required in a really powerful programming methodology. ... We have come to regard the DO, FOR, WHILE statements and the like as powerful tools, whereas they are in fact weak palliatives that are necessary to make the primitive von Neumann style of programming viable at all." and finally "My point is this: while it was perhaps natural and inevitable that languages like Fortran and its successors should have developed out of the concept of the von Neumann computer as they did, the fact that such languages have dominated the thinking for twenty years is unfortunate. It is unfortunate because their long-standing familiarity will make it hard for us to understand and adopt new programming styles which one day will offer far greater intellectual and computational power." I wonder what he thinks about Fortran still being developed 24 years after he made that comment! Miles -------------- Dr Miles Ellis Managing Director: Blue Chip Learning Limited Telephone: +44 1629 57542 Mobile: +44 7958 465614 Email: Miles@bluechiplearning.com