Re: call by name, was silly question: prefix vs postfix ops

<snip>
> [Now, now, let's not be hasty. Plenty of features have nothing to do
> with Fortran. They're due to the way COBOL worked. And a few are
> even attributable to Algol60, which in retrospect was phenomenally
> lucky that all but one of the things they invented turned out to be
> possible to implement efficiently, and the one that wasn't was a
> mistake. -John]


FWIW a year or two ago I glanced through Wexelblatt (History of
Programming Languages) at the local library, and while Peter Naur in
his presentation said he thought only one person on the committee
understood the implications of pass by name, other European members
disagreed with him. Neither Perlis, who introduced Naur, nor Backus
who should have been at the talk given he gave the Fortran talk at the
same symposium, made recorded comments on that topic.


[Perlis told me that call by name was a mistake. They were trying to
do an elegant definition of Fortran-style call by reference, and were
rather surprised when Jensen pointed out what they'd done. -John]

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