Re: Invention of the stack

"Bob Badour" <bbadour_at_pei.sympatico.ca> wrote in message news:Qc8xh.2066$R71.30214_at_ursa-nb00s0.nbnet.nb.ca...
> Walt wrote:
>
> > Bob Badour attributed the invention of stacks to Djikstra. I would have
> > supposed that John McCarthy invented stacks somewhat earlier.
> >
> > Does anyone know whether Djikstra got the idea for stacks from someone
else,
> > or invented it independently?
> > Does anyone know whether stacks (sometimes called pushdown lists in the
> > early literature) predate McCarthy's development of Lisp?
>
> First, I should point out that Dijkstra, himself, gives credit to
> several others who apparently came up with the same idea at around the
> same time he did.

>
> Wikipedia dates the publication of LISP at 1960 versus the stack at 1959:
>

McCarthy built Lisp earlier, although he didn't publish until 1960.

> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_McCarthy_(computer_scientist)
>
> Try not to get too wound up in it though. I originally mentioned the
> stack and semaphores to make the point that a proper focus on
> simiplicity and elegance enables brilliant minds like Dijkstra's to
> invent devices so useful they become so ubiquitous one has difficulty
> conceiving the world before they existed. At that point, works of true
> ingenuity seem trivial.
>

Point taken.

> I can find no fault in pursuing a legacy of ingenious triviality.

I would make a difference between the appearance of triviality and the reality of triviality.

The things that are truly trivial are unimportant, by definition. Things like stacks and semaphores may seem trivial to the masses at the time of their invention, but are not. Received on Sun Feb 04 2007 - 13:22:01 CET