On Mar 2, 2014, at 6:13 PM, Joe Niederberger <firstname.lastname@example.org> wrote:
> One can pretty easily regard those as straight-on surface manifestations of the underlying abstraction of a context-free grammar. Hansen's claim is that mathematical abstractions don't underlie programming language advances.
I claim, and remember, that the evolution of programming languages was driven by usage and programming. As far as I know, mathematics underlies just about everything.
Here, read this book. It covers the summer session at the University of Michigan in 1955. I have jumped to the section regarding ?Automatic Programming?...
Automating Programing and Auto Coding are the terms used for creating programming languages. I guess at the time, a *real* programmer wrote in machine code so they call anything less *real*, automatic programming. I can so feel their pain and desire, cause I went through all of this with the micro computers and before that the programable calculators. Having to type in every byte, building rudimentary assemblers. Remember Byte magazine and the programs that were included as a page full of hexadecimal numbers, essentially a compressed form of the actual machine code. Hopper talks about a Univac compiling a program. 8 minutes! Gosh. Reminds me of loading programs off of cassette tape. Now I remember where my life went.:)
They are mostly talking about assembler technology at here. Hopper talks about her work with A-0 through A-2, mostly an assembler as well. Backus isn?t at this session but the full spec of his new fangled Mathematical FORMula TRANslator System is included?
Very complete I might add, in 1954, and quite a leap past the assembler notions in the discussion above. I have been looking for subsequent summer sessions (they had them till 1963) because I am curious what they talked about after seeing a *real* language.
The FORTRAN manual even has a blurb on how to write a proper DO loop?