Abstract

The term ‘recursive’ has had different meanings during the past two centuries among various communities of scholars. Its historical epistemology has already been described by Soare (1996) with respect to the mathematicians, logicians, and recursive-function theorists. The computer practitioners, on the other hand, are discussed in this paper by focusing on the definition and implementation of the ALGOL60 programming language. Recursion entered ALGOL60 in two novel ways: (i) syntactically with what we now call BNF notation, and (ii) dynamically by means of the recursive procedure. As is shown, both (i) and (ii) were introduced by linguistically-inclined programmers who were not versed in logic and who, rather unconventionally, abstracted away from the down-to-earth practicalities of their computing machines. By the end of the 1960s, some computer practitioners had become aware of the theoretical insignificance of the recursive procedure in terms of computability, though without relying on recursive-function theory. The presented results help us to better understand the technological ancestry of modernday computer science, in the hope that contemporary researchers can more easily build upon its past.

Citations