History of programming languages I

• Authors: Richard L. Wexelblat
• Venue: History of programming languages I
• Year: 1978

These proceedings of the ACM SIGPLAN History of Programming Languages (HOPL) conference are a record, in the words of those who helped make the history, of a baker's dozen of the languages that set the tone of most of today's programming. It is difficult to describe the feeling that prevailed at the conference. There were no parallel sessions. Some attendees were graduate students, some pioneers, many were practitioners, and there seemed roughly an even division between industrial and academic affiliation. It was the first conference I attended where virtually everyone attended every session.The Conference General Chairman's introduction (page xvii) provides a rationale for the languages chosen and what the speakers were asked to prepare. There was an official Conference Historian. (How can you have a "History of . . ." conference without a historian?) His introduction (page xxi) attempts to present the conference in the perspective of modern history-of-science scholarship.The Keynote Address (page 7) was given by Grace Murray Hopper, Captain, USN, who was present at the birth of the industry and has remained an active participant. Her remarks indicate that a lot of what is considered novel and innovative today may well have first been done by her Remington-Rand Univac crew back in the 1950s.The largest part of this volume is taken up with the languages themselves, in chapters each assembled in the following way:The formal paper from the preprints (with some modifications by the authors).A transcript of the formal conference presentation.A transcript of the discussant's presentation. (There were discussants for APL, COBOL, FORTRAN, LISP, PL/I, and SIMULA only.)A transcript of the question and answer session.The full text of questions submitted in writing by the attendees (some with additional answers provided by the author).Authors' biographies.Summaries of the languages appear in Appendix A.The order of the languages in this book is the order of the talks given at the conference. With the exception of JOSS, the formal papers were published as preprints in ACM SIGPLAN Notices, Vol. 13, No. 8 (August 1978). The papers are reprinted here with the permission of ACM and of the authors. In some cases, changes to the preprints have been made by the authors to correct typographical or factual errors. In a few cases, additional material was added.For ALGOL, two speakers were chosen initially to reflect the European and American points of view. An additional "short note" from another ALGOL pioneer has also been included.The section on JOSS has a slightly different format since, due to a change in planned speaker, no paper for JOSS appeared in the preprints. To provide a broad historical outlook, the speaker was requested to make major revisions, expanding his talk into a formal paper.No two speakers are alike and the transcripts of the talks reflect the differences. Some tended to repeat in the oral presentation the material in the formal preprint; others gave almost completely independent talks. In editing the transcripts, no attempt was made to remove redundancy. As far as possible, all that was said is included here. Editing has removed false starts and hesitations; punctuation has been added to try to clarify involved, run-on sentences. Interpolations are, for the most part, enclosed in brackets. Most sessions began and ended with administrative announcements which are omitted here.Some of the talks were followed by formal presentations by discussants, and the transcripts of these are presented with the same type of editing as was used with the talks.The question and answer sessions were handled at the conference by having written questions submitted to the session chairman during the talk. The chairman selected some of them to ask the speaker; the editing of the speakers' replies is similar to that indicated above.The full text of all questions submitted is included and, in several cases, the authors have annotated this list, either keying the questions to the place in the transcript or the paper where it is answered or answering a question not covered at the conference.Authors were asked to provide a brief biography highlighting their activities before the time period covered by the paper and their more recent work. For the most part, the biographies are the author's own words. In a few cases, the editor had to create a narrative biography from a terse curriculum vitae. If editorial license was carried too far in any case, my apologies. The pictures that accompany the biographies are Candid photographs taken during the conference, and the subjects did not have a chance to select which pictures they preferred.The after-dinner speeches at the conference banquet were devoted to humorous reminiscences and anecdotes about the languages and events during their development. The banquet anecdotes are not included in this volume because, although they are humorous to hear, the voice inflections make a big difference, and they are not necessarily amusing to read.Audio and video tapes of the entire conference are available from ACM Headquarters: 1133 Avenue of the Americas, New York, New York 10036.