ecn-pa.alexande (07/21/82)
I thought net readers would enjoy this anecdote pertaining to programming in foreign languages, taken from a speech made by Capt. Grace Hopper to the ACM Conference on the History of Programming Languages (conference proceedings published by Academic Press, edited by Richard Wexelblat). She was discussing the FLOW-MATIC project, one of the first non-mathematical programming "languages." 'We got our little compiler running. It wouldn't take more than 20 statements. And on the back of this report, we put a nice little program in English. And we said, "Dear kind Management: If you come down to the machine room, we'll be delighted to run this program for you." And it read: INPUT INVENTORY FILE A; PRICE FILE B; OUTPUT PRICED INVENTORY FILE C. COMPARE PRODUCT #A WITH PRODUCT #B. IF GREATER, GO TO OPERATION 10; IF EQUAL, GO TO OPERATION 5; OTHERWISE GO TO OPERATION 2. TRANSFER A TO D; WRITE ITEM D; JUMP TO OPERATION 8. It ended up: REWIND B; CLOSE OUT FILE C AND D; and STOP. 'Nice little English program. But the more we looked at it, the smaller it looked. And we were asking for the biggest budget we had ever asked for. So we decided it would be a good idea if we did something more. We wrote a program. It went into the compiler and located all the English words and told us where they were, and we then replaced them. We said, "Dear Management: We'd also like to run this program for you. [Program spoken in French.] We'd like to run this French program for you." I don't know whether you recognized it, but the words are exactly the same and are in the same positions. 'Well, if you do something once, it's an accident; if you do it twice it's a coincidence; but if you do it three times, you've uncovered a natural law! [Laughter] So - that's why they always tell you to "Try, try, try again." We changed the words again; the third program was an impressive one, of course. [Program in German language this time. With laughter] Beautiful words in this one! "We'd love to run this program for you." 'Have you figured out what happened to that? That hit the fan!! It was absolutely obvious that a respectable American computer, built in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, could not possibly understand French or German! And it took us four months to say no, no, no, no! We wouldn't think of programming it in anything but English.' I have used this with permission from noone. Hope you enjoyed it. Alan Alexander-Manifold Purdue Library Systems Dept. pur-ee!ecn-pa!alexande