Coincidentally, I just bought this book the week before last. Definitely an interesting historical perspective. I've only skimmed it a bit, but one thing that s

Coincidentally, I just bought this book the week before last. Definitely an interesting historical perspective. I've only skimmed it a bit, but one thing that struck me was at the time (1969) the metasyntax for specifying the syntax of a programming language wasn't a settled thing. BNF was relatively new, but there were several alternatives in active use. She did point out the possibility of ambiguities, but there was no mention of LR (Knuth 1965) or LALR (DeRemer 1969) parsing. I guess parsing techniques were considered research at the time, not settled practice.