On Jan 26, 2007, at 11:07 AM, Boris Liberman wrote: >> Ok, geeky trivia time ... which came first, LISP or FORTRAN? And no >> peeking at google.com... ;-) > > Godders, every progra-toddler knows that Fortran was the first > symbolic > programming language after machine code and assembly. Lisp came in the > second ;-).
LOL ... well, it's not quite that simple. :-) FORTRAN (FORmula TRANSlation) was a high level language effort for numerical processing closer to human language for ease of use that started at IBM in 1954 but was first published for commercial use in 1957 ... prior to that, it was lab use only: in development by the authors. By 1960-1961, it had been updated to FORTRAN II. LISP (algebraic LISt Processing) in its basic form was developed at Dartmouth in 1956 and remained primarily a research language tool for AI work, although shared and used at several different institutions, until by 1960 a version conforming to Lisp1.5 had become the primary dialect. So they were developed at about the same time, although from entirely different motivations. Arguably, LISP was in use outside of its original point of creation prior to FORTRAN being available for anyone other than the authors to use and could be said to have been "first", and just as strong an argument would state that FORTRAN's original concept and design predated LISP by as much as two years. Fun stuff. Now to return to our regularly scheduled photo geekery. G -- PDML Pentax-Discuss Mail List PDML@pdml.net http://pdml.net/mailman/listinfo/pdml_pdml.net
