Chapter 11 - THE YEARS OF FORMAL LANGUAGES

Abstract

This chapter provides an overview of formal languages. The 60s did more for data processing than any other decade. Indeed, most of the next decade, that is, the 70s, was going to be devoted to sorting out the mass of material left by the good years. It may appear that the daily chaos towards the end of the decade was the only tangible fallout, that is, applications and systems in crisis. It would be wrong to think that there were no rules or methods. Many people had been thinking very deeply indeed about computation. Many formally structured ways were published. However, it all seemed so theoretical, so uncalled for, that some 10 years would have to pass before the public domain would be affected. Among the major events, there was the exponentially growing interest of theoreticians in automata theory and formal systems—a theory of which the basic and very exhaustive principles went back to the 30s, and of which Alan Turing is certainly the most impressive hero. It was established that automata theory is the basis of all computation. In the mid-50s, the development of the FORTRAN language spawned a formal description method of FORTRAN's syntax. It was imagined by Backus and improved by Naur—BNF or Backus–Naur Form. This was generalized by Chomsky and as a result, language theory jumped forward with gigantic leaps. Chomsky's theory was used as the basis of all modern compilers. Of all the daily and public preoccupations of data processing, compiler-building was becoming the most exact, the most formalized subtask ever. This field, in turn, was going to have a less visible effect upon programming as a whole.