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Author | Topic: A new member of the legion of geek ghosts |
EngrBohn Uber Geek Posts: 902 |
posted August 07, 2002 11:04
Earlier this year, Edsger Dijkstra returned to the Netherlands with incurable stomach cancer, to die there...
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quantumfluff Uber Geek Posts: 933 |
posted August 07, 2002 14:00
Hey everyone. We can start using GOTO again. IP: Logged |
ilovemydualg4 Highlie Posts: 607 |
posted August 07, 2002 18:17
mind if i ask without being flamed... who is this? ------------------ IP: Logged |
EngrBohn Uber Geek Posts: 902 |
posted August 08, 2002 04:55
Dijkstra could be called the father of structured programming. In 1968, he published GOTO Considered Harmful in CACM (according to legend, he wanted to publish a full-length paper, but decided it was more important to get this idea published quickly and made it a letter-to-the-editor). A tongue-in-cheek response was the proposal of the COMEFROM, which is funny on its own, but it's even funnier because one of the latest "interest items" is aspect-oriented programming, which looks like COMEFROM to me. He's also famous for observing that "Program testing can best show the presence of errors but never their absence". And he's responsible for a well-known algorithm to find the shortest path between two points on a weighted graph. He's the 1972 recipient of the Turing Award (not to be confused with the Turing Prize), which could be considered the "Nobel Prize for Computer Science". ------------------ IP: Logged |
EngrBohn Uber Geek Posts: 902 |
posted August 08, 2002 06:08
his obituary ------------------ IP: Logged |
quantumfluff Uber Geek Posts: 933 |
posted August 08, 2002 06:16
I was about to post the obit, but you beat me to it. I like the bit about "The Touring Machine" COMEFROM is not really similar aspect-oriented techniques. It did get implemented in C-INTERCAL. IP: Logged |
perfectstormy Geek Posts: 60 |
posted August 08, 2002 07:05
quote: Perhaps in this case, his program executed a GOTO. Or perhaps he made an exception... IP: Logged |
EngrBohn Uber Geek Posts: 902 |
posted August 08, 2002 07:05
I think aspect-oriented programming does have a COMEFROM flavor. When you write code that should be executed when the program counter hits some other part of the code, without modifying that other part of the code, that sounds like COMEFROM to me. \begin{edit} ------------------ IP: Logged |
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