Christopher Strachey and Fundamental Concepts

摘要

When I joined the Programming Research Group at Oxford in 1967, Christopher Strachey had just given the Copenhagen lectures on which Fundamental Concepts in Programming Languages is based. I was able to watch him preparing his notes for publication, and then to share his increasing frustration as publication was delayed and then abandoned. To refresh my memory while preparing this piece, I was fortunate to be able to refer to my copy of the draft: one version earlier than the one which was eventually widely circulated in typescript and published here. In his foreword, Peter Mosses has done an excellent job putting this important paper into its later context. It is also interesting, however, to consider its position in the subject as it was then. It is difficult to put oneself back into the perspective of those days. Oxford University had one, or maybe two computers: the Programming Research Group did not acquire a machine of its own until 1969. High-level programming languages were in their infancy (Fortran and Lisp, for example, as well as several "autocodes" for specific machines). The latest major example was Algol 60 (I remember seeing a display in an IBM showroom in Ottawa in 1964 which strongly implied that Algol was IBM's great hope for the future).