[Csci1301] Re: Natural Language Translation.

[John Howland]

On Thu, 11 Nov 2004, John Howland wrote:

> 
> Date: Sat, 6 Nov 2004 19:01:18 -0500
> From: Roger Hui <rhui000 at SHAW.CA>
> Subject: Re: KEI obituary - Le Monde
> 
> A rough translation from the original French to English is
> available by entering as the URL the string
> 
>  http://translate.google.com/translate?hl=en&sl=fr&u=
> 
> prefaced to
> 
>  http://www.lemonde.fr/web/recherche_articleweb/1,13-0,36-386082,0.html
> 
> 
> For those of you who are students of the French language,
> follow Roger's instructions to see the machine (google) translation
> of Iverson's Obit in Le Monde after first reading it in French at:
> 
> http://www.lemonde.fr/web/recherche_articleweb/1,13-0,36-386082,0.html

Here is another translation (garbled in a couple of places due to
improper character set translation of e-mail).


Date: Mon, 8 Nov 2004 13:53:57 -0600
From: PGauthier at CHECKFREE.COM
Subject: Re: KEI obituary - Le Monde

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My English is far from perfect but I do know French... Here is my 
translation of the article in "Le Monde". Please excuse my poor 
English.../Paul

Kenneth Iverson, father of one of the first computer languages.
Le Monde 11/06/04  updated 11/08/04 | 08:15

Canadian mathematician Kenneth Iverson past away on October 19, 2004, at 
the age of 83.  He was a victim of a cerebral stroke.

Born on December 17, 1920 in Camrose, Alberta, he had to quit school to 
work on his father's farm.  In 1945, after his demobilization from the 
Royal Canadian Air Force, he was allowed to pursue his studies.  He 
obtained a bachelor in mathematics from Queen's University in Ontario, 
Canada in 1951, and earned a master's degree in mathematics that same year 
at Harvard University in the United States.  In 1954, while still at 
Harvard, and under the direction of Professor Howard Aiken, he developed 
his doctoral thesis in applied mathematics on the subject of computerized 
resolution of linear differential equations (as applied to the dynamic 
economic model). 

In 1955, he became the assistant professor to Howard Aiken (Harvard's 
sacred inventor of the computer who created the Mark-1 in 1944) before 
joining IBM in 1960.  His interests were in mathematical notations that 
were capable of being directly programmable.  As a result, he developed 
Iverson's Notation, A Programming Language. collaboration until 1980
gave birth to the APL language.


Commercialized by IBM as soon as 1969, APL met its biggest success between 
1976 and 1984, as a tool of data processing accessible through 
time-sharing by phone.  In 1970, Ken Iverson became an IBM Fellow, which 
the company's most prestigious technical honor awarded to its top 
scientists, researchers and developers.

Computer system managers hesitated to offer APL on a wide scale because it 
gave neophytes access to large mainframe computers, who used the available 
resources to power mediocre programs.  APL on the microcomputer resolved 
the issue.

The language extension to generalized tables where the elements could 
themselves be tables gave rise to a schism in the IBM development team 
between the developers who were eager to go fast, and Ken Iverson, who
found the final solution between the years of 1973 and 1978.  In 1979, Ken 
Iverson received the highest distinction in the computer world:  The ACM 
Turing Award.

Ken Iverson left IBM to join IP Sharp Associates in Canada from 1980 to 
1986, where he worked on the evolution and extension of APL.  His 
publications  Rationalized APL, A Dictionary of the APL 
Language language of 1969.  Ken Iverson then decided to continue evolving the APL 
language under a new name, in order to be free to start from scratch
make some changes to APL's conventions and options.  His team finds a 
temporary name:  the J language.

With the J language, Iverson was able to abandon the special symbols used 
in APL and chose others available on all keyboards.  In 1990, because of 
the collaboration with the young, talented, and faithful Roger Hui, the 
first J interpreter appeared.  For Ken Iverson, it would be the final 
achievement of his dream for the APL language.

Sylvain Baron

> 
> 

-- 
_______________________________________________________________
John E. Howland       url: http://www.cs.trinity.edu/~jhowland/
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