Post #2423058
2026-03-11 21:07 UTC
@multisn8@mastodon.catgirl.cloud I would discourage having this sort of argument but Tony Hoare died less than a week ago, and this is from his Turing award acceptance speech. The original PDF is at https://dl.acm.org/doi/10.1145/358549.358561 and someone textified it at https://gist.github.com/jfacorro/50d0b736f4ee95950d5b969541302ba0
Replies (1)
-
@void_friend@tech.lgbt 2026-03-11 21:10
@multisn8@mastodon.catgirl.cloud Super interesting fact from that speech is that he invented Quicksort in a language that did not have recursion. It was an assembly language, and that meant not having “call”. The computer could store its PC, and jump back to a stored PC, but if you wanted to invent Quicksort you needed to invent the stack, first: visit https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elliott_803 and scroll down to “Entry to a subroutine at address N is normally effected by the sequence:”