http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~doug/doug.jpg * M. Douglas Mc''''''Ilroy * Adjunct Professor * Department of Computer Science * Dartmouth College * Hanover, NH 03755 http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~doug/ (formerly http://cm.bell-labs.com/who/doug/ ) Famous early Unix guy (see InventorsOfUnix); hounded Ken Thompson into creating pipes out of interest in coroutines and things similar to FlowBasedProgramming. "Doug Mc''''''Ilroy, the inventor of pipes, is said to point out that both pipes and lazy lists behave exactly like coroutines." ---- Inventor of lots of things that he is not widely acknowledged for, such as macros. ''And (jointly) CoreWars!'' Explicit pointer data types/variables as a higher level language construct were first introduced in PL/I, by Harold "Bud" Lawson with input from DonKnuth and DougMcIlroy * http://www.computerhistory.org/events/lectures/cobol_06121997/ "Mc''''''Ilroy was probably the first to propose the modern form of macros and the idea of conditional assembly" http://www.ecs.csun.edu/~dsalomon/COMP222/assem.pdf http://www.bell-labs.com/history/unix/streams.html http://csdev.cas.upm.edu.ph/~pfalcone/compsci/unix/unix-history1.html "Mc''''''Ilroy had been working on macros in the later 1950s, and was always theorizing to anyone who would listen about linking macros together to eliminate the need to make a series of discrete commands to obtain an end result. "If you think about macros," Mc''''''Ilroy explained, "they mainly involve switching data streams. I mean, you're taking input and you suddenly come to a macro call, and that says, 'Stop taking input from here and go take it from there.'" "Somewhere at that time I talked of a macro as a 'switchyard for data streams,' and there's a paper hanging in Brian Kernighan's office, which he dredged up from somewhere, where I talked about screwing together streams like a garden hose. So this idea had been banging around in my head for a long time." http://hopl.murdoch.edu.au/showlanguage.prx?exp=5635&language=Bell%20SAP SAP extended to include conditional and recursive macros: the beginning of the great macro-language tradition at Bell Labs (everything from L6 and AMBIT to C) macro assembler; 1959 Eastwood, D. E. and Mc''''''Ilroy, M. D. "Macro compiler modification of SAP". Bell Telephone Laboratories Computation Center, 1959 Arden, Bruce W. review of Mc''''''Ilroy 1960 in ACM Computing Reviews, January-December 1960 Macro processing modification of SAP. Led to TRAC. (accd. to http://hopl.murdoch.edu.au/showlanguage.prx?exp=91) This paper describes a form for defining new operations in terms of a basic assembly-like language and other defined operations. The use of such macro-instructions provides a concise way of describing complicated procedures The author describes and illustrates with examples the important features of these definitions such as (1) the ability to refer to other definitions, (2) the indication of a reference hierarchy by parentheses, (3) the ability to conditionally include or exclude instructions, and (4) the ability to create floating addresses. An application of these techniques to writing algebraic compilers is briefly indicated. This application deals only with fully parenthesized expressions and it is not clear how remote symbolic references (floating addresses) within definitions are handled. It is interesting to this reviewer to observe the gradual coalition of the structure of macro-assemblers (or compilers) and algebraic compilers. The author"s description of the coding that must be added to a programming routine to make it a macro- instruction compiler also constitutes a description of the essential portion of an algebraic compiler. This similarity suggests that an alternate approach might be to start instead with a base program which contains a syntactical scanner, a storage allocation procedure, and a mechanism for handling remote connections. Mc''''''Ilroy, M.D., "Using SAP Macro Instructions to Manipulate Symbolic Expression," Computer Laboratory Memo, Bell Telephone Laboratories, Murray Hill, N.J., 1960. Mc''''''Ilroy, M. D. "Macro Instruction Extension of Compiler Languages" in [ACM] CACM 3(04) April 1960 http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/cstr/cstr99.html Macroinstruction compilers constructed from a small set of functions can be made extremely powerful. In particular, conditional assembly, nested definitions, and parenthetical notation serve to make a compiler capable of accepting very general extensions to its ground language. Holbrook, Bernard D. and Brown, W. Stanley "A History of Computing Research at Bell Laboratories (1937-1975)" Computing Science Technical Report No. 99 1982 http://cm.bell-labs.com/cm/cs/cstr/cstr99.pdf In the late 1950s. several symbolic assembly languages, such as SAP, had become available, and by 1957 some of these, including IBM"s SCAT and SAP for the 704 machine, permitted users to define macroinstructions (often called macros) as shorthand for frequently occurring sequences of machine instructions. Then in 1959, M. Douglas Mc''''''Ilroy and Douglas E. Eastwood of Bell Labs introduced conditional and recursive macros into SAP, and in 1960 described how macros could be used to extend any programming language to meet the user"s own special requirements. Syntax macros and extended translation Volume 9 , Issue 11 (November 1966) table of contents Pages: 790 - 793 Year of Publication: 1966 ISSN:0001-0782 Author B. M. Leavenworth http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=365879 A translation approach is described which allows one to extend the syntax and semantics of a given high-level base language by the use of a new formalism called a syntax-macro. Syntax-macros define string transformations based on syntactic elements of the base language. Two types of macros are discussed, and examples are given of their use. The conditional generation of macros based on options and alternatives recognized by the scan are also described From Macros to Reusable Generative Programming http://www.netobjectdays.org/pdf/99/stja/krishna.pdf ---- CategoryPerson