CS 655: Programming Languages
Last modified: Mon Feb 26 12:48:21 2001
Manifest: Thursday 23 March 2000
| Assignments Due | |
| Today, 11:59pm | Project Prelminary Report |
| Monday, 3 April (11:59pm) | Position Paper 4 (Trial Verdicts) - Jurors Only | Tuesday, 11 April (in class) | Problem Set 3 |
Read before Tuesday 4 April:
| · | Turbak & Gifford, Applied Semantics of Programming Languages. Chapter 4. | |
| Denotational Semantics | ||
| · | Luca Cardelli. Basic Polymorphic Typechecking. Science of Computer Programming, 8(2): 147-172, 1987.
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| Describes ML type inference. | ||
In the 1950's von Neumann was employed as a consultant to IBM to
review proposed and ongoing advanced technology projects. One day a
week, von Neumann "held court" at 590 Madison Avenue, New York. On one
of these occasions in 1954 he was confronted with the FORTRAN concept;
John Backus remembered von Neumann being unimpressed and that he asked
"why would you want more than machine language?" Frank Beckman, who
was also present, recalled that von Neumann dismissed the whole
development as "but an application of the idea of Turing's `short
code'." Donald Gillies, one of von Neumann's students at Princeton,
and later a faculty member at the University of Illinois, recalled in
the mid-1970's that the graduates students were being "used" to hand
assemble programs into binary for their early machine (probably the
IAS machine). He took time out to build an assembler, but when von
Neumann found out about he was very angry, saying (paraphrased), "It
is a waste of a valuable scientific computing instrument to use it to
do clerical work."
From biography of John von Neumann at http://ei.cs.vt.edu/~history/VonNeumann.html.
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University of Virginia CS 655: Programming Languages |
cs655-staff@cs.virginia.edu Last modified: Mon Feb 26 12:48:21 2001 |