diff --git a/_posts/cs_idols/2019-09-13-peter-john-landin.md b/_posts/cs_idols/2019-09-13-peter-john-landin.md new file mode 100644 index 00000000000..f0a9dc94690 --- /dev/null +++ b/_posts/cs_idols/2019-09-13-peter-john-landin.md @@ -0,0 +1,38 @@ +--- +title: "「CS Idol」Peter John Landin" +subtitle: "「学术偶像」- 彼得·约翰·兰丁" +layout: post +author: "Hux" +header-style: text +hidden: true +tags: + - idol +--- + +> [wiki](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Landin) +> [维基](https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E5%BD%BC%E5%BE%97%C2%B7%E5%85%B0%E4%B8%81) + +I was long curious about how does λ calculus become the foundation of formalizaing programming languages. It's strange that I haven't look up the answer until today: It's invented so early by Alonzo Church (whom I will write another post for) as mathematicla foundation in 1930s and its relation with programming language was "re-discoverred" in 1960s. + +From the "Lambda calculus and programming languages" section of wikipedia page: + +> As pointed out by Peter Landin's 1965 paper "A Correspondence between ALGOL 60 and Church's Lambda-notation" + +I found this name quite familiar since I read his paper "The mechanical evaluation of expressions" before, in which he introduced the first abstract machine for functional programming language, namely [SECD machine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SECD_machine). This paper also define the term [Closure](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closure_(computer_programming)) which becomes a prevalent notion in computer programming nowadays. + +Besides of that, his contributions also include: + +- on standarlizing Algo +- [ISWIM](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISWIM) programming language +- [off-side rule](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Off-side_rule), known as "indentation-based" syntax nowadays, popularized by Miranda, Haskell, Python, etc. +- coin the term [syntactic sugar](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syntactic_sugar) + +He was much influenced by a study of McCarthy's LISP and taught [Tony Hoare](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tony_Hoare) ALGO with Peter Naur and Edsger W. Dijkstra. (Oh yes. definitely 4 more people to write). + +I have just download his old, influential paper "The next 700 programming languages.". I am sure it will be an enjoyable read. + + + + + +