文档介绍：197 7 ACM Turing Award Lecture
The 1977 ACM Turing Award was presented to John Backus putations called Fortran. This same group designed the first
at the ACM Annual Conference in Seattle, October 17. In intro- system to translate Fortran programs into machine language.
ducing the recipient, Jean E. Sammet, Chairman of the Awards They employed novel optimizing techniques to generate fast
Committee, made the ments and read a portion of machine-language programs. Many pilers for the lan-
the final citation. The full announcement is in the September guage were developed, first on IBM machines, and later on virtu-
1977 issue munications, page 681. ally every make puter. Fortran was adopted as a .
"Probably there is nobody in the room who has not heard of national standard in 1966.
Fortran and most of you have probably used it at least once, or at During the latter part of the 1950s, Backus served on the
least looked over the shoulder of someone who was writing a For. mittees which developed Algol 58 and a later
tran program. There are probably almost as many people who version, Algol 60. The language Algol, and its -
have heard the letters BNF but don't necessarily know what they pilers, received broad acceptance in Europe as a means for de-
stand for. Well, the B is for Backus, and the other letters are veloping programs and as a formal means of publishing the
explained in the formal citation. These two contributions, in my algorithms on which the programs are based.
opinion, are among the half dozen most important technical In 1959, Backus presented a paper at the UNESCO confer-
contributions to puter field and both were made by John ence in Paris on the syntax and semantics of a proposed inter-
Backus (which in the Fortran case also involved some col- national algebraic language. In this paper, he was the first to
leagues). It is for these contributions that he is receiving this employ a formal technique for specifying the syntax