Talk:Jensen's Device

It is amazing how wrong some ideas of early computing were. Fortunately none of modern languages really supports this mess. --Dmitry-kazakov 11:53, 22 November 2008 (UTC)

I don't think the guys in the 1960's had a monopoly on bad ideas... take the new "\" (back slash) operator in PHP[1] as an example. Fortunately, every now and then, a good idea floats to the top, the trick is being able to spot the good idea early and rewind all the bad ideas even earlier. NevilleDNZ 15:01, 22 November 2008 (UTC)

Seeing an entry on Jensen's Device just floats my boat.

Not knowing much about ALGOL60, I'm curious about its semantics -- why is i declared twice? When iterating over i, is that value being assigned local to sum, or is it being assigned in sum's caller? --Saccade 21:50, 5 May 2011 (UTC)

i is passed by reference to sum, the "first declaration" represents the declaration of the storage and the "second declaration" is the declaration of the type of the argument (much like a K&R C parameter list) in the parameters for sum. --Rdm 21:57, 5 May 2011 (UTC)