“The establishment of formal standards for proofs about programs […] and the proposal that the semantics of a programming language may be defined independently of all processors for that language, by establishing standards of rigor for proofs about programs in the language, appears to be novel.”

—  Robert Floyd

Source: Assigning Meanings to Programs http://www.cs.virginia.edu/~weimer/2007-615/reading/FloydMeaning.pdf (1967), pp. 19–20.

Adopted from Wikiquote. Last update Sept. 14, 2021. History

Help us to complete the source, original and additional information

Do you have more details about the quote "The establishment of formal standards for proofs about programs […] and the proposal that the semantics of a programmin…" by Robert Floyd?
Robert Floyd photo
Robert Floyd9
American computer scientist 1936–2001

Related quotes

Alan Kay photo

“… greatest single programming language ever designed. (About the Lisp programming language.)”

Alan Kay (1940) computer scientist

2003. Daddy, Are We There Yet? A Discussion with Alan Kay http://www.openp2p.com/pub/a/p2p/2003/04/03/alan_kay.html <br class="br">2000s

John Backus photo

“Von Neumann languages do not have useful properties for reasoning about programs. Axiomatic and denotational semantics are precise tools for describing and understanding conventional programs, but they only talk about them and cannot alter their ungainly properties. Unlike von Neumann languages, the language of ordinary algebra is suitable both for stating its laws and for transforming an equation into its solution, all within the "language."”

John Backus (1924–2007) American computer scientist

&quot;Can Programming Be Liberated From the von Neumann Style?&quot; http://dl.acm.org/ft_gateway.cfm?id=1283933&amp;type=pdf, 1977 Turing Award Lecture, Communications of the ACM 21 (8), (August 1978): pp. 639-640

Paul Graham photo

“A programming language is for thinking of programs, not for expressing programs you've already thought of.”

Paul Graham (1964) English programmer, venture capitalist, and essayist

&quot;Hackers and Painters&quot; http://www.paulgraham.com/hp.html, May 2003

Larry Wall photo

“If there's a particular problem that Perl is trying to solve, it's the basic fact that all programming languages suck. Sort of the concept of original sin, applied to programming languages.”

Larry Wall (1954) American computer programmer and author, creator of Perl

Public Talks, The State of the Onion 10

“19: A language that doesn't affect the way you think about programming, is not worth knowing.”

Alan Perlis Epigrams on Programming

Epigrams on Programming, 1982

Terry Pratchett photo

“My programming language was solder.”

Terry Pratchett (1948–2015) English author

On his early computers, from a talk "When I Were A Lad, We Used To Dream of 64K" at the 63rd World Science Fiction Convention in Glasgow, Scotland, (August 2005)
General sources

“For having a clear influence on methodologies for the creation of efficient and reliable software, and for helping to found the following important subfields of computer science: the theory of parsing, the semantics of programming languages, automatic program verification, automatic program synthesis, and analysis of algorithms.”

Robert Floyd (1936–2001) American computer scientist

1978 Turing Award Citation https://web.archive.org/web/20070708004814/http://awards.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=4173633&amp;srt=all&amp;aw=140&amp;ao=AMTURING. <br class="br">About

Larry Wall photo

“If you want to program in C, program in C. It's a nice language. I use it occasionally…”

Larry Wall (1954) American computer programmer and author, creator of Perl

[7577@jpl-devvax.JPL.NASA.GOV, 1990]
Usenet postings, 1990

“8: A programming language is low level when its programs require attention to the irrelevant.”

Alan Perlis Epigrams on Programming

Epigrams on Programming, 1982

“To the designer of programming languages, I say: unless you can support the paradigms I use when I program, or at least support my extending your language into one that does support my programming methods, I don't need your shiny new languages. […] To persuade me of the merit of your language, you must show me how to construct programs in it.”

Robert Floyd (1936–2001) American computer scientist

The Paradigms of Programming (1979)

Related topics