Kenneth E. Iverson

"Although mathematical notation undoubtedly possesses parsing rules, they are rather loose, sometimes contradictory, and seldom clearly stated. The proliferation of programming languages shows no more …"

"Overemphasis of efficiency leads to an unfortunate circularity in design: for reasons of efficiency early programming languages reflected the characteristics of the early computers, and each generatio…"

"The properties of executability and universality associated with programming languages can be combined, in a single language, with the well-known properties of mathematical notation which make it such…"

"It is important to distinguish the difficulty of describing and learning a piece of notation from the difficulty of mastering its implications. Indeed, the very suggestiveness of a notation may make i…"

"With the computer and programming languages, mathematics has newly-acquired tools, and its notation should be reviewed in the light of them. The computer may, in effect, be used as a patient, precise,…"

"I was appalled to find that the mathematical notation on which I had been raised failed to fill the needs of the courses I was assigned, and I began work on extensions to notation that might serve. In…"

"ACM Turing Award citation"

"The utility of a language as a tool of thought increases with the range of topics it can treat, but decreases with the amount of vocabulary and the complexity of grammatical rules which the user must …"