Path: news.daimi.aau.dk!news.uni-c.dk!sunic!sunic.sunet.se!news.luth.se!eru.mt.luth.se!bloom-beacon.mit.edu!news.kei.com!hookup!lll-winken.llnl.gov!venus.sun.com!male.EBay.Sun.COM!engnews2.Eng.Sun.COM!olm From: olm@Eng.Sun.COM (Ole Lehrmann Madsen) Newsgroups: comp.lang.beta Subject: Re: Where the name BETA comes from (was Re: BETA questions) Date: 6 May 1995 19:44:00 GMT Organization: Sun Microsystems Inc., Mountain View, CA Lines: 117 Message-ID: <3ogji0$ihc@engnews2.Eng.Sun.COM> References: <3jq90s$ojp@belfort.daimi.aau.dk> <3n5eht$m2i@fbi-news.informatik.uni-dortmund.de> <3niffk$qik@fbi-news.informatik.uni-dortmund.de> <3nl0gb$sq5@fbi-news.informatik.uni-dortmund.de> <96710780@edge.ping.de> <3oahk7$ir1@belfort.daimi.aau.dk> NNTP-Posting-Host: det.eng.sun.com X-Newsreader: NN version 6.5.0 #21 (NOV) olevi@daimi.aau.dk (Ole Villumsen) writes: >Tim Teulings writes: >>Yes, the name of the language always gives my some inspiration. Can someone >>tell where this name came from? >It's a very old story. As far as I've understood, there once in some >Nordic Universities was the idea of developing 4 languages, named after >the first 4 letters in the Greek alphabet (using transcriptions from >classic Greek): > ALPHA - a machine code langauge > BETA - a systems programming language > GAMMA - an application programming language > DELTA - a systems description language >This was *way* long before the terms alpha and beta release were ever >invented. Only BETA and DELTA were developed (enough that I ever heard >of them), and in addition a (cleaner) variant of DELTA named EPSILON. >On the other hand, BETA made it so well that it is now used also for >programming applications. >I find it funny to think that the Greeks call the letter VITA nowadays. >Ole V. Thanks to Ole Villumsen for posting the name story. Here is a longer version which was written recently. ---olm Where does the name BETA come from? ----------------------------------- Originally Beta was just one of a series of languages developed at Nordic universities. The first object-oriented language Simula was originally designed as a simulation language but it was soon realised that the main ideas could be used for programming in general and this lead to Simula 67, which has class, subclass, virtual function coroutines, etc. It also supplied the first object-oriented framework in the form of Class Simulation which is a set of classes to support the original goal of Simula to write simulation programs. It turned out that many users of Simula seemed to get more understanding of their problem domain by having to develop a model using Simula than of the actual simulation results. Kristen Nygaard and others then decided to develop a successor for Simula, but with main focus on system description - not execution. This lead to a language called Delta In Delta you could express true concurrent objects and use predicates to express state changes. Delta could, however, not be executed. Delta means 'participate' in Norwegian'. [E. Holbaek-Hannsen, P Haandlykken, K. Nygaard: System Description and the Delta Language. Norwegian Computing Center, Publ. no 523, 1973] When Kristen Nygaard was a visiting professor at Aarhus University in 1973-75, a project was started to develop a programming language based on the Delta ideas. This language should be a (programming language) successor to Simula and was called Gamma In the seventies it was often assumed that a general programming language was not usable as a system programming language. It was therefore decided to define a system programming language which should also be used to implement Gamma. This language was called Beta Finally the machine level languages were referred to as Alpha Long story:-) So what happened to Delta and Gamma? There is a (big) report (referred above) describing Delta and there has later been some related work on Delta including using it in a few projects, but it is no longer being used or developed. The language Epsilon was a simplified version of Delta and the result of attempts to formalize Delta by means of Petri Nets. The Gamma language was never developed. During the work on Beta it was soon realized that there was no need for Gamma. It turned out that by having powerful abstraction mechanisms in Beta, the Gamma-level could be handled by supplying class libraries and frameworks. You may thus think on the Gamma-level as the libraries and frameworks of the Mjolner BETA System. And this is where we are today. Some of the stuff in Delta could be handled by adding constraints to Beta and supporting invariants and pre/post conditions. (The idea of invariants and pre/post conditions for classes were originally suggested by Tony Hoare for Simula. [C.A.R. Hoare: Proof of correctness of data representation, Acta Informatics, 4, 271-281, 1972] The Mjolner BETA system has some libraries supporting initial versions of constraints and invariants. It has often discussed changing the name BETA - to avoid the beta-testing jokes. The suggestion for a name change is Scala - Scandinavian Language and also Scala means 'going up'... But so far it has been decided to stick with Beta.