John Backus
1924-2007
Backus was an
American
computer scientist.
He led the team that invented the first widely used
high-level
programming language
(FORTRAN)
and was the inventor of the
Backus-Naur form
(BNF), the almost universally used notation to define
formal language
syntax.
Backus–Naur Form (BNF)
is a
metasyntax used to express
context-free grammars: that
is, a formal way to describe
formal languages.
John Backus and
Peter Naur developed a context free grammar to define the
syntax of a programming language by using two sets of rules: i.e.,
lexical rules and syntactic rules.
BNF is widely used as a
notation for the
grammars of computer
programming languages,
instruction sets and
communication protocols, as
well as a notation for representing parts of
natural language grammars. Many textbooks for programming
language theory and/or semantics document the programming language
in BNF.
He also did research in function-level programming and helped to popularize it. |
|
The
IEEE awarded
Backus the
W.W. McDowell Award
in 1967 for the development of FORTRAN. He received the
National Medal of Science
in 1975,] and the 1977
ACM Turing Award
“for profound, influential, and lasting contributions to the design of
practical high-level programming systems, notably through his work on
FORTRAN, and for seminal publication of formal procedures for the
specification of programming languages. |