[Auugps] [AUUG-Talk]: Last call: dealing with two boxes of AUUG documents and photos from Christopher Vance

[Jon Wright]

I also remember GRIFFEN (spelling?) - the program proving language which was the most feared part of 2nd year…


> On 17 Sep 2020, at 11:13 am, Dave Horsfall <dave at horsfall.org> wrote:
> 
> On Wed, 16 Sep 2020, Greg Rose wrote:
> 
>> For those of you who were associated with UNSW, I'm sorry to pass on that Ken Robinson died recently. It's a little known fact that it was Ken, not John Lions, who wrote to Bell Labs to get the first Unix license outside North America. (John, at roughly the same time, wrote to Niklaus Wirth, to get Pascal! What a role reversal.)
> 
> Damn!  He was the best lecturer that I ever had, and he taught me much. And yes, I knew that it was Ken who ordered the tape when discussing the CACM article with Ian Hayes (and I have a vague recollection that it was Power Engineering who actually paid for it).
> 
> One of our assignments was to write a compiler called SYMPL (?), loosely based on ALGOL.  Now, semicolons are required, but I wrote the parser in such a way that it recognised the missing symbol (from the state of the parser etc), inserted it, and kept on compiling; I submitted a program with no semicolons whatsoever, it was faithfully corrected, and produced the correct output.
> 
> I think he also designed FLUB - First Language Under Bootstrap - which as you can guess had to bootstrap itself; I vaguely recall that punched cards were involved to define the character set or something (corrections welcome).
> 
> Vale, Ken.
> 
> -- Dave
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