[Tfug] Note of Passage

[Robert Hunter]

> For all you (us) dinosaurs lurking on this list, slashdot reports that
> John
> W. Backus, leader of the IBM team that developed FORTRAN, has died.  As
> one
> who writes 80-90% of his code in FORTRAN, who has been known to dream in
> FORTRAN (nightmare?), and still has a FORTRAN 80-column coding pad
> (somewhere), I mark his passing as that of a old friend.

Possibly a better known reference to John Backus is the Backus–Naur form
(BNF) that is used to describe programming language grammars.  There is
nary a CS student who has not heard of it.


-- 
RH