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ertyseidohl / computing-etymologies

Compilation of Etymologies of Computing Terms
https://ertyseidohl.github.io/computing-etymologies/
MIT License
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This #72

Open ertyseidohl opened 4 years ago

ertyseidohl commented 4 years ago

Potential lead: https://cs.stackexchange.com/questions/121528/what-is-the-earliest-use-of-the-this-keyword-in-any-programming-language?utm_source=Iterable&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=the_overflow_newsletter

ertyseidohl commented 4 years ago

Looks like we'd need a copy of "SIMULA: A Language for Programming and Description of Discrete Event Systems. Introduction and User's Manual" to check for sure.

ertyseidohl commented 4 years ago

There's no usage of this in the Nov 1966 Algol manual, so it seems likely that Simula 67 is in fact the first to use this.

There's a bunch of documents from the mid-70s describing Simula 67 and how it uses this but It'd be cool to be able to point at the original manual

ertyseidohl commented 4 years ago

From Hillel Wayne, who I emailed:

Looks like your intuition was dead on. Here's the Common Base Definition of Simula 67. Section 2.1 mentions the this keyword. It looks like Simula I doesn't contain the this keyword, and they don't mention any inspirations for this in their HOPL paper, so I suspect they invented this whole-cloth for 67. If you want to dig in further, this site is the best resource for Simula 67, and includes a full manual: http://www.simula67.info/

Hope this helps!