Talk:Plankalkül

Inline references, Anglifying

The article needs the inline references. It also is written the translated German in several places. I may get to this myself here in a bit. --Daydreamer302000 (talk) 07:14, 1 July 2009 (UTC)[reply]

Which University of Berlin?

There is no "University of Berlin"; which one implemented this language? Kwertii 21:14, 29 Mar 2004 (UTC)

That's correct, someone initially forgot to specify it as the TU-Berlin, but now it's fixed; see the article. --Wernher 06:14, 30 Mar 2004 (UTC)

Ouch ouch ouch, TU-Berlin was in fact very incorrect... It's _FU_-Berlin! Strangely, nobody caught this grave error of mine; neither did I until I checked the referred FU-Berlin paper. Strange also that TU-Berlin didn't 'beat' FU to the first implementation. After all, Zuse studied at the TU. Oh well. --Wernher 22:56, 4 Jul 2004 (UTC)

By the way: According to the German version of the article, the first compiler has been implemented in 1998, the FU Berlin one being an "alternative implementation". --FAeR 06:29, 17 October 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Thank you for that fact! Being a German-speaker, could you please be so kind as to ask, on the German article's Talk page, which university implemented the compiler initially? (i.e. two years before FU-Berlin did). I couldn't find that in the article. --Wernher 14:37, 17 October 2005 (UTC)[reply]

Hello world

Hello world anyone? --Anonymous

Yep, that would be nice. Not sure how suitable the Plankalkül is for string output, though; haven't studied it that much. My preliminary investigations don't seem to indicate any such features. --Wernher 22:56, 4 Jul 2004 (UTC)

Too bad 'bout the "END"

In this day and age the lingua franca of science & engineering is English, of course, and I have no problem with that; still, as a semi-continental European, I'd have felt a little better if the Plankalkül at least had used German reserved words (which I assume it would have back in '43 if Zuse had been able to publish then)... ENDE. --Wernher 22:56, 4 Jul 2004 (UTC)

The only "word" I recall in the PK was FIN (French, obviously), assignment of 1 to FIN was supposed to signal the end of a program. Abbreviations, such as W for Wiederholungsplan and Z for Zwischenwert betray German influence. -Anon

"FIN" is from Latin "finis". --141.91.129.2 (talk) —Preceding undated comment added 12:06, 24 July 2009 (UTC).[reply]

Heinz Rutishauser developed his programming language Superplan from 1949 to 1951, and it was influenced by the Plankalkül.
Its only control structure -- the for-loop -- was actually called the Für Anweisung.

Für i=2(1)n :    $a_{i}$  + 3 =  $a_{i}$

means, that in an array a all elements i (steps of 1) from 2 to n are incremented by 3.
There you got your "German reserved word".
Christian Storm 21:56, 7 February 2007 (UTC)[reply]

Introduction

What is "postwar Nazi Germany" as referred to in the introduction? --95.117.201.135 (talk) 21:06, 15 November 2009 (UTC)[reply]

example

The example program is from Rojas, Raúl, et al. (2000). The syntax is the linearized form used in that article, not the original Zuse's syntax. We should take something from the original paper. --Jonah.ru (talk) 12:21, 23 July 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Example

I've copied an example from the German Wikipedia page de:Plankalkül. The text before the actual code is my attempted clean-up of a Google translate. It would be good if a German speaker could check & correct the translation. Thanks Kiore (talk) 09:21, 11 August 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Link to The "Plankalkül" of Konrad Zuse: A Forerunner of Today's Programming Languages by Friedrich L. Bauer is broken. — Preceding unsigned comment added by 93.208.199.74 (talk) 07:43, 19 May 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Scholz and Zuse

The intro reads: "In March 1945 Scholz expressed his deep appreciation to Zuse for his utilization of the logical calculus." It is unclear whether "his" refers to Scholz or Zuse. Someone in the know might want to clarify. Pns185 (talk) 12:44, 24 July 2014 (UTC)[reply]

Eclipse Plugin

Years ago I downloaded a German Diplom-Thesis (244 pages) about a new implementation of the Plankalkül as an Eclipse-Plugin -- I still have the written text as a PDF but not the code. The thesis was written by Matthias Gernand (advisors were Prof. Rainer Koschke and Dr. Berthold Hoffmann) and it was called "Das Erwachen des Plankalkül" [2009] (i.e. The Awakening of the Plankalkül). I decided to look at it later. Strangely, now nothing can be found on the net. (if Mr. Gernand reads this -- would be nice to make the plugin available). Or maybe others have more luck||patience. 87.182.97.187 (talk) 20:53, 9 August 2015 (UTC)[reply]

External links modified

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Suggestion for 1998 "Citation Needed"

Whereas, the article's "History" section, for "Other independent implementations followed in 1998", there is a remark that citation is needed.

Whereas, the "External Reference" pointing to M Wolfgang's implementation was marked as 2016 (the archiving date), its README file states "Plankalkuel-Compiler 1.00 (C) 1997, 1998 Wolfgang Mauerer". (https://web.archive.org/web/20161115175703/http://www.bytesex.de/mauerer/pk/README)

Would someone be so kind as to update the article and references in an appropriate way? Also, maybe the actual implementation date is 1997 rather than 1998?

—Starlocke (talk) 00:23, 21 May 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Added that link. If somebody could help to format it properly - please do. --Benderovec (talk) 18:47, 3 September 2020 (UTC)[reply]

Plankalkül and Begriffsschrift

In 2004, user Leibniz added the observation "Although it was far ahead of its time, the Plankalkül was marred by an idiosyncratic notation using multiple lines; strangely, it shares that affliction with Gottlob Frege's Begriffsschrift of 1879 (dealing with mathematical logic)." This point strikes me as informative and interesting, but it appears to have been taken by some to violate the rules on neutral point of view.

In 2006 user Ds13 replaced the sentence just quoted with "Plankalkül shared an idiosyncratic notation using multiple lines with Frege's "Begriffsschrift" of 1879 (dealing with mathematical logic)." In 2009 a "clarification needed" note was added to the sentence, but no real clarification is possible; the new formulation is simply false and is apparently based on a misunderstanding of the sentence it replaced. A glance at the examples in the article and in other sources on Plankalkül makes clear that it shares nothing with Begriffsschrift beyond the fact that both exploit the two-dimensionality of writing on paper.

So I have attempted to reformulate the point made by user Leibniz without violating the POV guidelines, and without the reference to Frege, since the parallel is rather thin.

I have not, however, deleted the claim that Plankalkül was influenced by Begriffsschrift. That seems almost certainly false, and I wonder if the unidentified author of the slide deck cited as an authority was influenced by the confusion in this Wikipedia article. But I'll leave that correction to someone who feels more confident than I do about asserting a negative claim. C.M.Sperberg-McQueen (talk) 23:35, 12 March 2023 (UTC)[reply]

(July 2024) It has now been a year, and while I'm still not confident about asserting a negative claim, I do feel confident in removing the positive claim that Zuse was influenced by Frege. A priori, the claim is unlikely: The two notations look nothing like each other, Zuse was not a student of logic or of pure mathematics, and Frege was largely forgotten for much of the 20th century, so it's most likely the at the time he developed PK Zuse had never heard of Frege. I'm no Zuse expert, but nothing I've seen while trying to understand how this claim of influence by Frege came about has suggested any connection or any way in which Zuse might have learned of Frege's work.

For such an unlikely claim, solid evidence would be needed. But none is available. The citation offered in support of the claim is a pointer to some unsigned slides from a lecture course on great ideas in computer science. The slides are good and well done, but they offer no substantiation of the claim of influence, and the graduate student who prepared them has not responded to email inquiry about the source of the information about an influence by Frege. As described above, I think it's plausible that the information came from an editing error in this page due to someone rephrasing a sentence they did not understanding and making it say something false.

On the principle of "first, do no harm", I guess it's better to say nothing than to propagate a positive claim of influence that lacks any convincing supporting evidence. C.M.Sperberg-McQueen (talk) 14:58, 17 July 2024 (UTC)[reply]