History
The SETL programming language (later 1960s) had a set formation construct, and the computer algebra system AXIOM (1973) has a similar construct that processes streams, but the first use of the term "comprehension" for such constructs was in Rod Burstall and John Darlington's description of their functional programming language NPL from 1977.
Smalltalk block context messages which constitute list comprehensions have been in that language since at least Smalltalk-80.
Burstall and Darlington's work with NPL influenced many functional programming languages during the 1980s but not all included list comprehensions. An exception was the influential pure lazy functional programming language Miranda which was released in 1985. The subsequently developed standard pure lazy functional language, Haskell, includes many of Miranda's features including list comprehensions. The Python programming language was heavily influenced by the pure lazy school of functional programming and adopted list comprehensions. Pure functional programming remains a niche while Python achieved wider adoption which introduced list comprehensions to a wider audience.
Comprehensions were proposed as a query notation for databases and were implemented in the Kleisli database query language.
Read more about this topic: List Comprehension
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“In history an additional result is commonly produced by human actions beyond that which they aim at and obtain—that which they immediately recognize and desire. They gratify their own interest; but something further is thereby accomplished, latent in the actions in question, though not present to their consciousness, and not included in their design.”
—Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770–1831)
“The history of any nation follows an undulatory course. In the trough of the wave we find more or less complete anarchy; but the crest is not more or less complete Utopia, but only, at best, a tolerably humane, partially free and fairly just society that invariably carries within itself the seeds of its own decadence.”
—Aldous Huxley (1894–1963)
“One classic American landscape haunts all of American literature. It is a picture of Eden, perceived at the instant of history when corruption has just begun to set in. The serpent has shown his scaly head in the undergrowth. The apple gleams on the tree. The old drama of the Fall is ready to start all over again.”
—Jonathan Raban (b. 1942)