Re: chomsky and compiler development

Much appreciate your reply.


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.


Chomsky in his 1993 book Language and Thought (most of the material
was taken from an Academic Conference in NY in which he was the
keynote speaker) articulates some of his Philosophical thinking which
you've captured I think at least fairly well. He has been outspoken
since the 50's in his disdain for Logical Positivism - which is
important to understand as the motivation as well as the culmination
of his Linguistic Research.




Edward G. Nilges <spinoza1111@yahoo.com> wrote in message
> In 1973, I read FORMAL GRAMMARS AND THEIR RELATION TO AUTOMATA. This
> was by Hopcroft and Ullman and was published by Addison Wesley.
>
> Hopcroft and Ullman used the Chomsky type hierarchy by name to
> classify formal grammars and to prove correspondence of each type in
> sequence (regular, context free, and context sensitive) to classes of
> formal automata from the finite state machine, to machines with an
> auxiliary stack or stacks, up to Turing complete machines.
> [snipped]

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