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One can argue that many features of programming languages have existed in theory since days of Euclid and Archimedes. This article argues that ALGOL was the fir
by sytelus 11y ago
One can argue that many features of programming languages have existed in theory since days of Euclid and Archimedes. This article argues that ALGOL was the first attempt to "standardized" features of a programming language that was expected to be in wide spread usage. It was designed by committee of big name experts and the "comedy" part is that lot of these people considered recursion as unnecessary or even harmful. No one knows what would have happened if ALGOL indeed didn't supported recursion, became widespread and was considered as gold standard. How many years before someone would have broken the barrier and said experts were wrong and recursion is one of the most important part of language?
- dragonwriter 11y ago> How many years before someone would have broken the barrier and said experts were wrong and recursion is one of the most important part of language? Lisp was used quite a lot even after Algol 60 was standardized; presumably that would have occurred at least as much if Algol 60 was standardized without support for recursion -- inevitably, actually, moreso if Algol 60 didn't support recursion. Maybe, including recursion in Algol 60 didn't make recursion mainstream, it just stopped Lisp from being more mainstream and made Algol 60 and its descendants successful. Really, its hard to know.