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title: "「CS Idol」Peter John Landin"
subtitle: "「学术偶像」- 彼得·约翰·兰丁"
layout: post
author: "Hux"
header-style: text
hidden: true
tags:
- idol
---

> [wiki](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Peter_Landin)
> [维基](https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/%E5%BD%BC%E5%BE%97%C2%B7%E5%85%B0%E4%B8%81)
I was long curious about how does λ calculus become the foundation of formalizaing programming languages. It's strange that I haven't look up the answer until today: It's invented so early by Alonzo Church (whom I will write another post for) as mathematicla foundation in 1930s and its relation with programming language was "re-discoverred" in 1960s.

From the "Lambda calculus and programming languages" section of wikipedia page:

> As pointed out by Peter Landin's 1965 paper "A Correspondence between ALGOL 60 and Church's Lambda-notation"
I found this name quite familiar since I read his paper "The mechanical evaluation of expressions" before, in which he introduced the first abstract machine for functional programming language, namely [SECD machine](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SECD_machine). This paper also define the term [Closure](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Closure_(computer_programming)) which becomes a prevalent notion in computer programming nowadays.

Besides of that, his contributions also include:

- on standarlizing Algo
- [ISWIM](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ISWIM) programming language
- [off-side rule](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Off-side_rule), known as "indentation-based" syntax nowadays, popularized by Miranda, Haskell, Python, etc.
- coin the term [syntactic sugar](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Syntactic_sugar)

He was much influenced by a study of McCarthy's LISP and taught [Tony Hoare](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tony_Hoare) ALGO with Peter Naur and Edsger W. Dijkstra. (Oh yes. definitely 4 more people to write).

I have just download his old, influential paper "The next 700 programming languages.". I am sure it will be an enjoyable read.






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