| مستخلص: |
Developer of the Fortran programming language. John Backus's work at IBM revolutionized computer programming. In the 1950s, he assembled and led the team that developed Fortran, the first high-level programming language, one rigorous enough to remain in use today. In the course of doing so, he also introduced the first optimizing compiler, in order to encourage Fortran's adoption. Later in the same decade he introduced the Backus-Naur Form (BNF), a notation technique for context-free grammar, a metalinguistic approach to describing languages. Such notation techniques—of which BNF remains one of the two standards—make it easier to discuss and describe programming languages. Backus used it in developing programming languages in the ALGOL family, but he continued to look for better ways to program. His function-level programming language, FP, never caught on, but his introduction of it did raise interest in functional programming as a general area of research. |
