The Genesis of Attribute Grammars
The Genesis of Attribute Grammars
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属性文法的起源
DOI：
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发表时间：
1990
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影响因子：
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通讯作者：
D. Knuth
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作者：
D. Knuth
我一直对思想的起源很感兴趣，所以我很高兴这次会议的组织者要求我回顾一下这个主题是如何开始的。换句话说，我很高兴我的工作是给这个会议一个“历史属性”。属性语法诞生于60年代中期令人兴奋的日子，当时计算机科学的许多基本原理开始被理解。大量的想法漂浮在空中，等待被捕捉到正确的组合，这将被证明是未来能源的强大来源。众所周知，人类的大脑不善于重构过去的经历，所以我尽可能多地挖掘早期的真实信息，以使我的故事尽可能准确。人们说怀旧已经今非昔比，但我希望这次会议的参与者能够分享我在准备这份回顾性研究时所经历的一些快乐。我的故事大部分发生在1967年，当时世界各地已经编写了大量复杂的计算机程序。计算机自30年代和40年代发明以来已经走过了漫长的道路;例如，最近宣布的Burroughs B6500被恰当地称为“第三代”系统[35]，J. P. Eckert注意到新计算机设计中的并行化趋势[37]。然而，许多没有简单解决办法的问题使人们清楚地意识到，计算机的巨大潜力才刚刚开始被开发，许多重要问题根本没有得到很好的理解。在当时广泛调查的一个令人困惑的问题是编程语言语义的问题：我们应该如何定义算法语言中语句的含义？1964年，数十位专家聚集在维也纳参加一个关于正式语言描述的会议，T. B。小斯蒂尔：“改进编程语言描述方法势在必行。..我自己也不知道如何描述一门语言的语义。我敢说没有人这样做，否则我们就不会在这里了。斯蒂尔编辑了那次会议的记录，其中包括生动的讨论记录。
I have always been fascinated by the origin of ideas, so I am pleased that the organizers of this conference have asked me to open the proceedings by taking a look back at how the subject began. In other words, I'm glad that my job is to give this conference a " history attribute. " Attribute grammars were born in the exhilarating days of the mid-60s when a great many fundamental principles of computer science were beginning to be understood. An enormous number of ideas were floating in the air, waiting to be captured in just the right combinations that would prove to be powerful sources of future energy. The human mind is notoriously bad at reconstructing past experiences, so I have tried to make my story as accurate as possible by digging up as many scraps of authentic information from the early days as I could find. People say that nostalgia isn't what it used to be, but I hope that the participants of this conference will be able to share some of the pleasure I have experienced while preparing this retrospective study. Much of my story takes place in 1967, by which time a great many sophisticated computer programs had been written all over the world. Computing machines had come a long way since their invention in the 30s and 40s; for example, the recently announced Burroughs B6500 was aptly called a " third generation " system [35], and J. P. Eckert was noting a trend toward parallelism in new computer designs [37]. Yet many problems without easy solutions made people well aware that the vast potential of computers was only beginning to be tapped and that a great many important issues were not at all well understood. One of the puzzling questions under extensive investigation at the time was the problem of programming language semantics: How should we define the meaning of statements in algorithmic languages? Dozens of experts had gathered in Vienna in 1964 for a conference on formal language description, and the prevailing mood at that conference is well summarized by the remarks of T. B. Steel, Jr.: " Improvements in programming language description methods are imperative. .. I don't fully know myself how to describe the semantics of a language. I daresay nobody does or we wouldn't be here " [31]. Steel edited the proceedings of that meeting, which include lively transcriptions of discussions …