On 01/02/2019 12:41 PM, Schachner, Joseph wrote:
The name "Python" may not make sense, but what sense does the name Java make,
or even C (unless you know that it was the successor to B), or Haskell or Pascal or even
BASIC? Or Caml or Kotlin or Scratch? Or Oberon or R? Or Smalltalk, or SNOBOL?
BASIC is an acronym..
http://bitsavers.trailing-edge.com/pdf/dartmouth/BASIC_Oct64.pdf
Beginner's All purpose Symbolic Instruction Code
It was Dartmouth University's didactic language for non-engineers and
probably nobody imagined it would ever go anyplace. I went to an
engineering school and learned FORTRAN in '65, the same time period, and
never heard of BASIC until much later.
My wife went to a liberal arts college where they also had a didactic
language that ran on CDC systems. I can't remember the name of the
language but both it and CDC are dusty footnotes now,
SNOBOL was sort of a tortured acronym, StriNg Oriented symBOlic
Language. I don't know if that was a play on COmmon Business Oriented
Language.
FORTRAN came from FORmula TRANslation. My favorite is a weird little
language mainly useful for matrix operations that IBM modestly named APL
- A Programming Language. Of course they also had PL/I, Programming
Language One.
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