Thursday, March 22, 2007

John Backus - father of FORTRAN - RIP

As well as being the father of the first high level language suitable for numerical work - and of Algol 60 which can be taken as the root of most of today's widely used languages like C, C++ and Java - John Backus lives on as coauthor of Backus Naur Form (BNF) which we still use in the Oracle docs - for example:

relational_table ::= CREATE [GLOBAL TEMPORARY] TABLE [schema.]table
[(relational_properties)]
[ON COMMIT {DELETE | PRESERVE} ROWS]
physical_properties
table_properties;

No comments: