Re: A database theory resource - ideas

On Mar 19, 11:37 pm, mAsterdam <mAster..._at_vrijdag.org> wrote:
> Marshall wrote:
> > It would be culturally insensitive* to judge the book and the language
> > by current standards. You fault them for the lack of formality, but
> > when did formal methods for describing programming languages
> > really get started?
>
> Wikipedia mentions 1956 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chomsky_hierarchy)
> - and 1959 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backus-Naur_form) or is
> this not what you meant with "really"?

A fair point. Let me change the phrase "formal methods for describing programming languages" to "formal methods for describing programming languages *semantics*." Both the Chomsky hierarchy and BNF are syntactic methods. And in fact K&R, and Thompson and Pike and co., were early adopters of such formalisms. Thompson was maybe the first to write a program to match regular expressions (from the Chomsky hierarchy.)

Although actually, maybe I should just shut up, because I don't think I've opened K&R since I graduated, and Tony has the moral high ground.

Marshall Received on Tue Mar 20 2007 - 15:14:57 CET