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Cover Quote: November 1970

Even in the field of programming languages and compilers, there is too much concern with form. I say “even” because one might feel that this is one area in which form ought to be the chief concern. But let us consider two assertions: 1) languages are getting so they have too much syntax, and 2) languages are being described with too much syntax. Compilers are not concerned enough with the meanings of expressions, assertions, and descriptions. The use of context-free grammars for describing fragments of languages led to important advances in uniformity, both in specification and in implementation. But although this works well in simple cases, attempts to use it may be retarding development in more complicated areas. There are serious problems in using grammars to describe self-modifying or self-extending languages that involve executing, as well as specifying, processes. One cannot describe syntactically—that is, statically—the valid expressions of a language that is changing. Syntax extension mechanisms must be described, to be sure, but if these are given in terms of a modern pattern-matching language such as SNOBOL, CONVERT, or MATCHLESS, there need be no distinction between the parsing program and the language description itself. Computer languages of the future will be more concerned with goals and less with procedures specified by the programmer.



- Marvin Minsky
1969 ACM Turing Lecture, 2003
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