by adrian_b | 2026-03-10 18:51:21+00:00
You should provide a citation for where Bud Lawson has published his invention.

The use of pointers in assembly language does not count as an invention, as it was used since the earliest automatic computers. The use of implicit reference variables, which cannot be manipulated by the programmer, like in FORTRAN IV (1962) does not count as pointers.

The method for forcing another level of evaluation of a variable by using a "$" prefix, which was introduced in SNOBOL in January 1964, and which has been inherited by the UNIX shell and its derivatives does not count as a pointer.

The term "pointer" was introduced in a revision of the IBM PL/I language, which was published in July 1966. In all earlier publications that I have ever seen the term used was "reference", not "pointer".

There are 2 high-level programming languages that were the first to introduce explicit references (i.e. pointers). One language was Euler, published in January 1966 by Niklaus Wirth and Helmut Weber. However Hoare knew about this language before the publication, so he mentioned it in his paper from November 1965, where he discussed the use of references (i.e. pointers).

The other language was the language CPL, which had references already in August 1963. The difference between how CPL used references and how Euler used references is that in Euler pointer dereferencing was explicit, like later in Pascal or in C. On the other hand, in CPL (the ancestor of BCPL), dereferencing a pointer was implicit, so you had to use a special kind of assignment to assign a new value to a pointer, instead of assigning to the variable pointed by the pointer.

Looking now in Wikipedia, I see a claim that Bud Lawson has invented pointers in 1964, but there is no information about where he has published this and about which is the high-level programming language where the pointers of Bud Lawson had been used.

If the pointers of Bud Lawson were of the kind with explicit dereferencing, they would precede by a year the Euler language.

On the other hand, if his pointers were with implicit dereferencing, then they came a year after the British programming language CPL.

Therefore, in the best case for Bud Lawson, he could have invented an explicit dereferencing operator, like the "*" of C, though this would not have been a great invention, because dereferencing operators were already used in assembly languages, they were missing only in high-level languages.

However, the use of references a.k.a. pointers in a high-level programming language has already been published in August 1963, in the article "The main features of CPL", by Barron, Buxton, Hartley, Nixon and Strachey.

Until I see any evidence for this, I consider that any claim about Bud Lawson inventing pointers is wrong. He might have invented pointers in his head, but if he did not publish this and it was not used in a real high-level programming language, whatever he invented is irrelevant.

I see on the Internet a claim that he might have been connected with the pointers of IBM PL/I.

This claim appears to be contradicted by the evidence. If Bud Lawson had invented pointers in 1964, then the preliminary version of PL/I would have had them.

In reality, the December 1964 version of PL/I did not have pointers. Moreover, the first PL/I version used in production, from the middle of 1965 also did not have pointers.

The first PL/I version that has added pointers was introduced only in July 1966, long enough after the widely-known publications of Hoare and of Wirth about pointers. That PL/I version also added other features proposed by Hoare, so there is no doubt that the changes in the language were prompted by the prior publications.

So I think that the claim that Bud Lawson has invented pointers is certainly wrong. He might have invented something related to pointers, but not in 1964.

PL/I had one original element, the fact that pointer dereferencing was indicated by replacing "." with "->". This has later been incorporated in the language C, to compensate its mistake of making "*" a prefix operator.

The "->" operator is the only invention of PL/I related to pointers, so that is a thing that has been invented by an IBM employee, but I am not aware of any information about who that may be. In any case, this was not invented in 1964, but in 1966.