Barbara Liskov wins Turing Award

[Terry Reedy]

Chris Rebert wrote:
> On Thu, Jun 25, 2009 at 12:34 AM, Steven
> D'Aprano<steven at remove.this.cybersource.com.au> wrote:
>> I haven't seen any links to this here: Barbara Liskov has won the Turing
>> Award:

It was posted about the time of the announcement, but is worth the reminded.

>> http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/2009/turing-liskov-0310.html/?
>>
>>
>> [quote]
>> Institute Professor Barbara Liskov has won the Association for Computing
>> Machinery's A.M. Turing Award, one of the highest honors in science and
>> engineering, for her pioneering work in the design of computer
>> programming languages. Liskov's achievements underpin virtually every
>> modern computing-related convenience in people's daily lives.
>> [end quote]
>>
>> Liskov is well known for the "Liskov substitution principle". She also
>> created the language CLU, one of the most important inspirations to
>> Python

This inspired me to to spend a couple of hours finding and reading a CLU 
manual.

> Erm, Wikipedia (which is generally excellent on programming topics)
> seems to disagree with you.
> 
> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Python_(programming_language)
> "Influenced by	ABC, ALGOL 68,[1] C, Haskell, Icon, Lisp, Modula-3, Perl, Java"
> 
> Unless you mean it influenced Python indirectly by way of the
> aforelisted languages...

Python's object model, assignment semantics, and call-by-object 
mechanism, and that name, come from CLU.  Whether Guido knew of it 
directly or not, I do not know. To the extent that the above is part of 
the heart of Python, I think Steven's statement stands pretty well.