GoKawiil
Tech News
EMACS, one of the first full-screen text editors, turns 50 this year, according to MIT Technology Review. It originated in 1976 on video terminals at the MIT Artificial Intelligence Laboratory and was later rewritten for numerous operating systems, including Apple's Mac OS X.
A writer named Eric examines where the 'else' keyword in programming languages came from, noting that 'else' is not used as a conjunction in ordinary English speech. He traces conditional logic back to 1946 work on the Eniac computer by Haskell Curry and Willa Wyatt, who called the concept 'discrimination' rather than 'else', and follows how conditional jump instructions evolved as computers moved from plugboard wiring to stored-program memory.