Home Original page

Catching Save - newbie

Michael Hudson mwh at python.net
Wed Apr 16 15:12:36 EDT 2003 
Peter Hansen <peter at engcorp.com> writes:

> Michael Hudson wrote:
> > 
> > Peter Hansen <peter at engcorp.com> writes:
> > > The last time I used Google (of which I'm well aware of course), it
> > > told me that Knuth was in fact merely paraphrasing someone else
> > > (google can tell you who it was, if you wish ;-),
> > 
> > Yes, you can find lots of people claiming it was Hoare that said this.
> > However, their plurality doesn't necessarily make them right.
> 
> True... but neither does the fact that Knuth (also?) said it make
> them wrong.

This is true.

> On the other hand, this is the first time I've seen a claim, found
> via google or not :-), that Hoare did not in fact say that.  Is your
> view authoritative, or a supposition?

This all came up in a thread on comp.lang.lisp (I have the quote in my
sigfile), which you can probably google-group for and where people
(eventually) sounded quite certain.

And unless someone went to the bother of faking a poorly-scanned pdf
of Knuth's paper, the quotation and attribution I gave is correct.

It is entirely possible that Hoare said something like this *as well*,
of course.  I don't have a reference, however, and have never seen
one.

Cheers,
M.

-- 
  Worryingly, DEFUN appears to be a function that removes all the
  fun from something: after using it all your code is converted 
  to C++.                              -- Tim Bradshaw, comp.lang.lisp
More information about the Python-list mailing list