Peter Naur Wins 2005 Turing Award

An anonymous reader writes "The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) has named Peter Naur the winner of the 2005 A.M. Turing Award. The award is for Dr. Naur's fundamental contributions to programming language design and the definition of Algol 60, to compiler design, and to the art and practice of computer programming. The Turing Award is considered to be the Nobel Prize of computing, and a well-deserved recognition of Dr. Naur's pioneering contributions to the field."

Comments

Datalogy

[Peter_Pork]

Peter Naur is an interesting character. For example, he dislikes the term "Computer Science", and prefers "Datalogy". He also gives Backus the whole credit for inventing BNF, which he calls the Backus Normal Form. I'm sure he has a better name for Algol-60...

Re:Datalogy

[Anonymous Coward]

He's a very funny character indeed. I study at DIKU where Naur used to work, and one of the funny things he invented was "the Naur frame".

The Naur frame is an A4 sized piece of cardboard with a hole in it like a picture frame. When he would read and grade a report he would place this frame over the report when reading it. So if your margin was too narrow the frame would cover some of your text. He would then give you a horrible grade because your report didn't make any sense.

A rather hard way to force people into having large margin, but also quite funny.

Re:Datalogy

[paradigm82]

Here are some other stories (I study at DIKU too): * For most reports handed in at DIKU (like on most other universities I guiess) there's an upper limit on the number of pages you can hand in. Peter Nauer had the policy that if he received a report with more than that number of pages, he would simply refuse to read the last excess pages. * For every day a report was handed too late he would subtract one grade point. This led to complaints from the administration so the policy is now that overdue hand-ins are always marked as "failed". * Nauer didn't like spending too much time on lectures. He therefore tape-recorded them in advance and the lecture simply consisted of the tape being played and the students could ask/answer questions (sometimes rewinding the tape ) between themselves. He would then show up for 5 minutes at the end of the lecture to answer any remaining questions.

Algol 60 Group

[JehCt]

It's interesting that Peter Naur is being recognized 40 years later, when another Algol team member, Alan Perlis, received the first Turing Award in 1966. Here's a photo of Perlis, Naur and the other Algol 1960 conference participants.

Danes everywhere...

[weg]

Amazing how many programming languages were actually invented by Danish computer scientists. Peter Naur (ALGOL), Bjarne Stroustrup (C++), Anders Hejlsberg (C#), and Mads Tofte contributed a good deal to SML.

The Algols were good

[Anonymous Coward]

Although you were making a joke, it didn't actually reflect reality at all. Algol 60 was quite seminal, and Algol 68 was almost the "Perl" of its time, really powerful.

In almost 40 years since the Algol family of languages was defined, we haven't really moved things along all that much. Quite a lot of the "improvements" in modern languages are not fundamental but largely aesthetic. Pretty pathetic really.

Nearly 4 decades ago, we programmed in Algol 68 and we walked on the moon. It's curious how the pace of progress in both realms slackened off quite suddenly, to put it generously.

Re:Nobel Games

[AuMatar]

The Nobel committee has not made any awards that Alfred Nobel himself did not decide to set up. Economics is not a real nobel prize- its official name is "The Bank of Sweden Prize in Economic Sciences in Memory of Alfred Nobel"- in other words its a rip off of the name. Quite fitting, given macroeconomics is a pseudo-science, that it be given a pseudo-award.

Honest question from curious geek-

[Josh teh Jenius]

I just read the WikiPedia article on Alan Turing:

In 1952, Turing was convicted of acts of gross indecency after admitting to a sexual relationship with a man in Manchester. He was placed on probation and required to undergo hormone therapy. When Alan Turing died in 1954, an inquest found that he had committed suicide by eating an apple laced with cyanide.

Then the article mentions an urban legend:

In the book, Zeroes and Ones, author Sadie Plant speculates that the rainbow Apple logo with a bite taken out of it was an homage to Turing. This seems to be an urban legend as the Apple logo was designed in 1976, two years before Gilbert Baker's rainbow pride flag.

Urban Legend? Anyone have any more info on this?

In case you haven't seen it in a while, here is the classic Apple logo:
http://www.jeb.be/images/Apple/apple_logo_(640x480 ).jpg.

Re:Honest question from curious geek-

[solitas]

The original Apple logo: http://203.151.217.14/databases/d0002/images/logo1 .jpg

Re:Took a while, didn't it?

[hopopee]

Maybe it has something to do with Backus leading the project that created the FORTRAN language. You know, one of the most used languages ever. That is still used for scientific calculating.

Re:There is a saying...

[AuMatar]

Why do you have to worry about increasing your string length? That should be taken care of by your string library. Lets say you want to concatenate 2 strings. YOu don't just use strcat() do you? The correct way to do it is to write a function that goes something line this


string* strcat(string *str1,string *str2){
    if(str2.length+str1.length>str1.size){
        if(reallocstr(dst,str2.length+str1.length)==ALLOCE RROR){
            return NULL;
        }
    }
    memcpy(str1.buffer+str1.length,str2.buffer,str2.le ngth);
    return str1;
}


Where string is a struct defined by the library. If you're using the plain C string library, that in itself is a problem- you're right, using it is slow and requires you to keep track of too much stuff. So don't-- use a better string library. There's a few dozen in C you can download off the web.

Another feature that I suspect is helpful, if not in making things go faster, in reducing the expenditure of mental energy, is the use of iterators like foreach. Being able to iterate over a list without having to worry about what the first index is and what the last index is etc. as with a C-style for makes it much easier.

So why don't you write a list library that takes a function pointer and calls it on each member of the list? Or one that at least has functions so you can look like this (assume a list of ints for the following example):


for(int iter=begin(list);iter!=end(list);iter=getnext(list ,iter)){
    int val=getval(list,iter); //do work
}


Your problem doesn't seem to be C, its using C poorly. If you're not doing stuff like this, you're working at the wrong level of abstraction. That leads to slow to write, buggy code in any language. And its equally likely in any language.

Re:Took a while, didn't it?

[Anonymous Coward]

Speaking of years, a near equivalent of Backus-Naur Form had been used sometime in 5th century BCE (yes, 2500 years ago) by Panini to describe the grammar of Sanskrit language.

Naur denies having contributed to BNF

[MarkoNo5]

Naur himself denies having invented BNF together with Backus. According to himself, it is the Backus Normal Form. Other people put his name in it.

Re:Some contributions of Algol60

[hritcu]

> 1. The Report on the language used a formal syntax specification, one of the first, if not the first, to do so. Semantics were specfied with prose, however. Unfortunately this is the case with all programming languages (with the exception of standard ML).