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Spotted at Andrew Plotkin's blog is an interesting article on the two word control panel in the original Apollo Guidance Computer, which talks about the use of "VERB" and "NOUN" controls on the original instrument panel.
This then links to a Discover Magazine Article How Verbs and Nouns Got Apollo to the Moon, which describes how the Apollo astronauts interacted with the guidance computer by:
[...] entering Noun-Verb combination commands in lieu of a string of written words. To keep it simple, the commands were written out in short hand. For example, V37N31E stood for Verb 37 Noun 31 and Enter to get the program running.
[...] It might not seem like it, but the Noun-Verb arrangement and verbiage comes from the fact that the computer engineers who built and used the Apollo guidance computer were also inventing it as they went along. They didn't have backgrounds in computer engineering because the field didn't exist then as it does today. But they all spoke English, so carrying over the same language structure simplified things for everyone. It's a perfect example of the brilliant simplicity that went into so much engineering of the Apollo era.
(Score: 2) by VLM on Friday September 01 2017, @12:03PM (6 children)
Also consider CLI "rm file" is verb-noun
Also consider emacs, C-b is "character" "move-back", M-b is "mode-dependent definition of word" "move-back"
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 01 2017, @01:51PM (5 children)
So Emacs innovated by going noun verb instead of verb noun?
(Score: 3, Informative) by lentilla on Friday September 01 2017, @03:48PM (2 children)
Very droll, AC. Nicely done.
VLM: that was a terribly misleading Emacs example! It had not occurred to until you mentioned it here that "Character" and "Mode" could be used as mnemonics for C- and M- operations... but they aren't universally applicable and happens to be quite misleading in this context.
For the uninitiated: C-b means "Control-b", which is bound to the command (backward-char &optional n). The verb is "backword-char", the noun in this case is the argument "n". So when you press "C-b" the argument is 1 by default. In similar fashion, "M-b" could mean (backward-word &optional ARG): again, verb is "backward-word", noun is usually 1.
To put it succinctly: Shift/Control/Meta/Super/Hyper keys are merely shift keys. They are part of the verb.
Perhaps though, Emacs and its siblings in the Lisp family did have an innovation, past the common assembly language pattern of op-code followed by operand: they allow a verb followed by multiple nouns. (Prefix notation: in this case because the "noun" is a really "list of nouns".) So you could say (+ 1 2 3).
(Score: 3, Interesting) by maxwell demon on Friday September 01 2017, @04:56PM (1 child)
Already assembly knows multiple operands, for example on Z80 (a quite old 8-bit processor): ld b,d Here ld is the verb (load), b is the first noun (the b register), and d is the second noun (the d register).
The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
(Score: 1, Interesting) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 01 2017, @08:26PM
Z80 even had a search instruction, taking as its operands the target value and a memory range to search for the value.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday September 01 2017, @04:02PM (1 child)
Observant, you are.
(Score: 2) by DECbot on Friday September 01 2017, @04:34PM
Damn you Yoda! Great pain, in my head, you cause.
cats~$ sudo chown -R us /home/base