Computing versus human thinking
Peter Naur · Communications of the ACM · 2007
Consequently my principal contribution to this work was the development of a new form of description, continuing the work of John Backus [1], and the application of this form to describing the programming language adopted by the Algol committee.This new form of description was an indirect critique against the form of description employed in the earlier version, so-called Algol 58.It was first presented in a working document to the Algol 60 conference in Paris in January 1960January [8-1960]].The discussions leading to Algol 60 were later described by Perlis [51] and in . COMPILER DESIGNDuring the following years I got mostly engaged in the design of compilers for Algol 60.My main contribution was the design, together with Jørn Jensen, of the Gier Algol compiler .The success of this design rested directly on taking the primary issue in the design of a compiler to be, not syntactic analysis, but storage allocation.The Gier Algol compiler had 9 translation passes.During execution the translated program was held in a paging system.Some of the techniques of the compiler were described separately in [10-1965, 12-1965, 15-1966].