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Peter Naur Wins 2005 Turing Award
Posted by
ScuttleMonkey
on Sat Mar 04, 2006 04:47 PM
from the celebrating-people-who-deserve-it dept.
from the celebrating-people-who-deserve-it dept.
An anonymous reader writes "The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) has named Peter Naur the winner of the 2005 A.M. Turing Award. The award is for Dr. Naur's fundamental contributions to programming language design and the definition of Algol 60, to compiler design, and to the art and practice of computer programming. The Turing Award is considered to be the Nobel Prize of computing, and a well-deserved recognition of Dr. Naur's pioneering contributions to the field."
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Science: ACM to Honor TCP/IP Creators with Turing Award 143 comments
bth writes "The New York Times reports that Vint Cerf and Robert Kahn will receive the ACM Turing Award. According to the ACM website: The Association for Computing Machinery, has named Vinton G. Cerf and Robert E. Kahn the winners of the 2004 A.M. Turing Award, considered the "Nobel Prize of Computing," for pioneering work on the design and implementation of the Internet's basic communications protocols." Commentary from Groklaw also available.
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Took a while, didn't it? (Score:5, Insightful)
-jcr
Re:Took a while, didn't it? (Score:4, Informative)
The Backus-Naur form (BNF) (also known as the Backus-Naur formalism, Backus normal form or Panini-Backus Form) is a metasyntax used to express context-free grammars: that is, a formal way to describe formal languages.
Taken from the wikipedia page [wikipedia.org].
Parent
Re:Took a while, didn't it? (Score:5, Informative)
Parent
Naur denies having contributed to BNF (Score:4, Interesting)
Parent
Re:Took a while, didn't it? (Score:5, Funny)
Parent
Re:Took a while, didn't it? (Score:5, Funny)
Must be why they compare it with the Nobel.
Parent
There is a saying... (Score:4, Funny)
Nice to see Peter getting some recognition.
Re:There is a saying... (Score:5, Insightful)
The real problem is code reuse. 95% of what we do on a daily basis is to reinvent features available elsewhere. What we need are well designed, easy to use libraries that we can leverage and have most of the work done for us. Closed source programs are killing us, as we can't leverage off each other. Its like going back to the days of Newton and Liebnitz and requiring all mathematicians to prove the same ideas without reference to one another's work before moving on. Its ridiculous, and its the reason for our problems.
Parent
Re:There is a saying... (Score:4, Insightful)
It is much more difficult to master and retain the syntax of some languages than of others, so a lot of the time you aren't going to know them equally well. In any case, I think you're just wrong about language not making a difference. It is much slower to write in a low-level language than in a high-level language. Sure, you may have mastered the syntax, but you still have to spend time and mental energy keeping track of what goes where if you don't have data structures like structs and arrays, and just adding automatic storage allocation and garbage collection saves a lot of time and bugs.
Parent
Re:There is a saying... (Score:5, Insightful)
Garbage collection is a whole other rant- thats a complete strawman. Memory management takes a minor amount of time (almost 0), and making sure you properly null out dangling references in Java takes about as much. I find the problem to be totally different- there's a subset of programmers who just don't understand memory management. These people suck as programmers- everything you do in programming is resource management. Memory- alloc, use, free. Files- open, use, close. Networking- connect,use,close. Having people who don't understand that pattern on your team causes work to slow down by large amounts because of their incompetnece, not because of the language.
Parent
Re:There is a saying... (Score:3, Insightful)
If you've got macros in assembler with macros that make structs and arrays easy, you're not writing real assembler but one of those new-fangled intermediate languages. That's a step up right there.
Anyhow, its the storage allocation that is the big thing. I just don't agree that it makes such a small difference. It isn't just the need to free up what you use - that's relatively easy. It's the constant checking of whether you've got enough or need to reallocate, and the sometimes complicated and error-pro
Re:There is a saying... (Score:3, Insightful)
I disagree. A quick download of a few libraries to help out (a database access library, a regex library, a better string library, maybe one or two others) and I'm ready to go. Rails is a particularly poor example- yeah, it autogenerate
I didn't think (Score:5, Funny)
Datalogy (Score:5, Interesting)
Some contributions of Algol60 (Score:5, Informative)
2. There was a distinction between the publication language and the implementation language (those probably aren't the right terms). Among other things, it got around differences such as whether to use decimal points or commas in numeric constants.
3. Designed by a committee, rather than a private company or government agency.
4. Archetype of the so-called "Algol-like languages," examples of which are (were?) Pascal, PL./I, Algol68, Ada, C, and Java. (The term Algol-like languages is hardly used any more, since we have few examples of contemporary non-Algol-like languages.)
However, as someone who actually programmed in it (on a Univac 1108 in 1972 or 1973), I can say that Algol60 was extremely difficult to use for anything real, since it lacked string processing, data structures, adequate control flow constructs, and separate compilation. (Or so I recall... it's been a while since I've read the Report.)
life::= birth education career gods_waiting_room ; (Score:3, Insightful)
and his fantastic career.
Hedley
Danes everywhere... (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:Danes everywhere... (Score:4, Informative)
Parent
Re:Me, like many readers of slashdot (Score:4, Funny)
You passed the test. No computer would mangle the pronoun usage like this!
Parent
Re:Me, like many readers of slashdot (Score:5, Funny)
(copied from http://www.h2g2.com/ [h2g2.com] )
Dave? Are you there Dave?
A test for artificial intelligence suggested by the mathematician and computer scientist Alan Turing. The gist of it is that a computer can be considered intelligent when it can hold a sustained conversation with a computer scientist without him being able to distinguish that he is talking with a computer rather than a human being.
Some critics suggest this is unreasonably difficult since most human beings are incapable of holding a sustained conversation with a computer scientist.
After a moments thought they usually add that most computer scientists aren't capable of distinguishing humans from computers anyway.
Parent
Re:Just Algol-60? (Score:4, Informative)
@article{365140,
author = {Donald E. Knuth},
title = {Backus Normal Form vs. Backus Naur form},
journal = {Commun. ACM},
volume = {7},
number = {12},
year = {1964},
issn = {0001-0782},
pages = {735--736},
doi = {http://doi.acm.org/10.1145/355588.365140 [acm.org]},
publisher = {ACM Press},
address = {New York, NY, USA},
}
Parent
Re:Sample code (Score:3, Funny)
No more wordy than COBOL. Seems like a cool language
Re:Sample code (Score:5, Funny)
I did one in LISP; I'm still trying to find an unmatched (.
Parent
Re:Honest question from curious geek- (Score:4, Interesting)
Parent
Re:Nobel Games (Score:3, Insightful)
I'll grant that there are many conflicting models in macro. Many of them stem from the assumptions. For example, assuming a closed economy or an open economy. In the real world and throughout history, various countries are somewhere in between, but often closer to one or the other. Thus, choosing appropriate assumptions for the question you'