This is well deserved, but what took the ACM so long? I was honestly surprised that they hadn't already won the award.
And the Turing Award for best compilation goes to... Jeffrey Ullman and Alfred Aho
This year’s Turing Award has gone to two men who helped create the foundation on which modern software is built. Jeffrey Ullman and Alfred Aho first met when doing their PhDs at Princeton University in the early 1960s; a time when computing machines were devices operated and programmed by a relatively small group of …
COMMENTS
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Thursday 1st April 2021 12:10 GMT Martin Gregorie
Re: Awkward
ymmv, but in my experience awk kicks the crap out of other programs designed to do the same job. The only one I think comes near it is NCC Filetab, which was around on ICL kit around 1970 and is still available for Linux and Windows.
Where awk is regex based, filetab uses a decision table to specify the data selection and manipulation you want.
I've used and dislike one or two other pretenders for this task space (RPG3 and sed): neither can match awk for ease of use and readability.
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Thursday 1st April 2021 10:56 GMT disgruntled yank
Re: '67 ?
I am not a historian of compiler theory, but I should say that they summarized and synthesized a lot of what was out there. The bibliography in my copy of the Dragon Book runs to 28 pages. From the bibliography and notes, I see that Hopper and COBOL do not get a mention, though Backus and Fortran do. I suppose this may have been a matter of perceived influence on compiler development, but I leave it for the qualified to say.
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Monday 5th April 2021 15:25 GMT david 12
Re: '67 ?
The big step that opened up computers to a vast array of people who began to write software that now powers just about everything we equate with the modern world was Dartmouth BASIC. At the time there was a split between the SF idea of computers as intelligent thinking machines, and the real world idea of computers that they were big calculators, tabulators, or accounting machines. The world of computing laughed at Kemény for wanting to put computers into the hands of humanities and social science undergraduates: they laughed at Kurtz for thinking it was possible.
The BASIC compiler that Dartmouth built was complex, fragile and engineered by a brilliant programmer. In the 80's, any undergraduate with an interest could write a BASIC interpreter. The difference was "Principles of Compiler Design".
EST 7:09PM
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Thursday 1st April 2021 09:52 GMT Julz
Many
congratulations to them both. I hope that are in a position to appreciate the money. I have a dogeared copy of Design and Analysis of Computer Algorithms sitting on a shelf. It survived the great book cull when I downsized house. Great book that I would recommend to any who wants to do more that piece together web tat.
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Thursday 1st April 2021 11:33 GMT Antron Argaiv
Compiler design
It's been more than a few years since I took my compiler design course...and, no, I haven't designed any compilers...but from what I remember, the process of designing a compiler was first to analyse, then tokenise, then compile. I may have the sequence wrong, but there were tools (lex, yacc) for each step. Perhaps this framework for the construction of an arbitrary compiler is what Aho and Ullman contributed? Anyway, the award is well-deserved. Their books made a lasting impact on me - very clear and well written.
I've spent my time as an Electrical Engineer, but in school we did have an introduction to the softer side of Computer Engineering, and I was impressed by the fact that construction of a compiler from an arbitrary language to an arbitrary assembler was such a well-trodden path.
Dragon Book is upstairs in the attic, but K&R is on the shelf in front of me, along with Brooks' Mythical Man-Month
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Sunday 4th April 2021 17:21 GMT keithpeter
Re: What happened to Ravi Sethi?
@ Crypto
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ravi_Sethi
Dr Sethi is in honourable retirement from Bell labs and another research based company, and is emeritus professor status in a US university. Seems to have had a good career.
Later versions of the Dragon book had a variety of co-authors.
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Friday 2nd April 2021 12:39 GMT MarkMLl
Vastly wide of the mark
I don't know who advises the ACM grandees on this sort of thing, but the charitable assumption is that he was working from home and the wrong side of the paywall that protects the ACM archives from plebs like us.
Everybody agrees that Aho (, Sethi) and Ullman wrote and maintained a comprehensive book describing compiler writing. But crediting them with major contributions to the field?
What about Irons (recursive ascent), Grau and Waychoff (recursive descent), Knuth (who famously wrote a mainframe ALGOL compiler over his Summer vacation), and Wirth (an undeniable "doer" and influential on just about every major language)? What about Schorre (compiler-compilers) and Richards in the UK (BCPL?) What about Hoare and Dijkstra, who laid much groundwork even if not significant compiler authors in their own right? Hell, what about Alan Kay (Smalltalk)?
Crediting Aho and Ullman as substantial contributors of original work is vastly wide of the mark, and smacks of the current tendency to lionise "media personalities" and to listen to those who make the most noise.
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Saturday 3rd April 2021 01:02 GMT swm
Re: Vastly wide of the mark
In 1964 there was a BASIC compiler (not interpreter) using ad hoc parsing written by J. G. Kemeny and an ALGOL-60 compiler written by Sars Blumpson(sp?) using a recursive descent on the Dartmouth time sharing system. Much of this technology was well distributed in the computing community.
Writing a text book which made many of these techniques available in a single place is still noteworthy though.
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Saturday 3rd April 2021 19:42 GMT MarkMLl
Re: Vastly wide of the mark
Yes, that's a good point and one I was thinking about. But I still think that the gushing way in which Aho and Ullman are described by various people quoted in the article, which omits the crucial words "contributed by documenting" etc. isn't really appropriate.
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