Re: chomsky and compiler development

GenericInfoService <genericinfoservice@yahoo.com> wrote:
[...]
: Thanks for the reference to Hopcroft and Ullman. If I discover
: additional worthwhile information from some computer experts I know, I
: will post it here. One gentleman - an academic who unfortunately I
: cannot recall - a few years back opined that without Chomsky we would
: not have modern computer compilers without their context-free
: grammars. That seemed a little extreme, and I'm glad to get other
: opinions here.


If my impressions are correct about indepenent and prior work, I doubt
compiler development would have been delayed at all if Chomsky's
discoveries had not occurred. Specifically, I'm of the impression
that:


    * BNF equivalent of context-free grammars was discovered independently
        and about the same time by Backus, Naur, and others.


    * Kleene, Mealy, Moore and others came up with regular expressions
        and finite-state automata independently of Chomsky.


    * The idea of formal grammars had existed in the logic community since
        the mid '30s and sometime in the '40s Post gave some very general
        definitions of formal grammars.


I'd appreciate it if somone could corroborate those impressions (or
disabuse me of my misimpressions).


Tom Payne
[That all agrees with my understanding. -John]

Return to the comp.compilers page.
Search the comp.compilers archives again.