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Besides his contribution to language design, he authored one of the best puns ever. His last name is properly pronounced something like "Virt" but in the US everyone calls him by "Worth". That led him to quip, "In Europe I'm called by name, but in the US I'm called by value."
Earlier quoted context omitted.
>His stance on compiler optimizations is another example: only add optimization passes if they improve the compiler's self-compilation time. What an elegant metric! Condensing a multivariate optimisation between compiler execution speed and compiler codebase complexity into a single self-contained meta-metric is (aptly) pleasingly simple. I'd be interested to know how the self-build times of other compilers have chan…
You cannot add a loop skew optimization to compiler before compiler needs a loop skew optimization. Which it would not need at all because it is loop skew optimization (it requires matrix operations) that need a loop skew optimization. In short, compiler is not an ideal representation of the user programs it needs to optimize.
EDIT: typo in the last word but I'm leaving it in for obvious reasons.
Besides his contribution to language design, he authored one of the best puns ever. His last name is properly pronounced something like "Virt" but in the US everyone calls him by "Worth". That led him to quip, "In Europe I'm called by name, but in the US I'm called by value."
I saw it stated as pronounced as Veert, somewhere, maybe in his Wikipedia or Wikiquote pages.
Besides his contribution to language design, he authored one of the best puns ever. His last name is properly pronounced something like "Virt" but in the US everyone calls him by "Worth". That led him to quip, "In Europe I'm called by name, but in the US I'm called by value."
The joke goes back to Adriaan van Wijngaarden introducing Wirth at a conference in the 1960s. I'd love to see a video of the audience reaction to that one. https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Niklaus_Wirth https://lists.racket-lang.org/users/archive/2014-July/063519...
> Finally a short story for the record. In 1968, the Communications of the ACM published a text of mine under the title "The goto statement considered harmful", which in later years would be most frequently referenced, regrettably, however, often by authors who had seen no more of it than its title, which became a cornerstone of my fame by becoming a template: we would see all sorts of articles under the title "X considered harmful" for almost any X, including one titled "Dijkstra considered harmful". But what had happened? I had submitted a paper under the title "A case against the goto statement", which, in order to speed up its publication, the editor had changed into a "letter to the Editor", and in the process he had given it a new title of his own invention! The editor was Niklaus Wirth.
It is refreshing to see the old-fashioned trope of the genius computer scientist / software enginieer as a "foreigner to the world" being contested again and again by stories like this.
Of course people like Niklaus Wirth are exceptional in many ways, so it might be that the trope has/had some grain of truth, that just does not co-correlate with the success of said person :)
And of course people might want to argue about the differences betweem SE, CS and economics.
After all that rambling... RIP and thank you Niklaus!
Wirth was the chief designer of the programming languages Euler (1965), PL360 (1966), ALGOL W (1966), Pascal (1970), Modula (1975), Modula-2 (1978), Oberon (1987), Oberon-2 (1991), and Oberon-07 (2007). He was also a major part of the design and implementation team for the operating systems Medos-2 (1983, for the Lilith workstation), and Oberon (1987, for the Ceres workstation), and for the Lola (1995) digital hardwa…
I still wonder what the tech world would’ve been like today if Wirth had had the marketing sense to call Modula “Pascal 2”
Bwahah! Bwahah!
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Also collaborated with Apple on Object Pascal initial design, his students on Component Pascal, Active Oberon, Zonnon, and many other research projects derived from Oberon.
For those who don't know, Pascal was what a lot of the classic Mac software was written in, before Objective-C and Swift. It grew into Delphi, which was a popular low-code option on Windows.