🚀 go-pugleaf

 pereira@alice.att.com (Fernando Pereira) writes:
>In article <6402@goanna.cs.rmit.oz.au> ok@goanna.cs.rmit.oz.au (Richard A. O'Keefe) writes:
>>Neither ``arity'' nor ``functor'' was invented by logic programmers.
>>You can find ``functor'' in Robinson's book.
>>
>> [various references]
>
>Richard's references are relatively recent. I first encountered the term 
>in books on universal algebra, eg. P. M. Cohn's ``Universal Algebra'' (1965).
>Mac Lane's ``Categories for the Working Mathematician'' (1971) uses it too.
>This in just a quick survey of my home library.
>
>Fernando Pereira
>AT&T Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill
>pereira@research.att.com
>----------

Having been perhipherally peripherally involved with the compilation of 
the New OED, I asked a spy (Tim Bray at Waterloo) and got the following reply:
 
|Date: Tue, 25 Jun 91 07:45:59 -0400
|From: Tim Bray <tbray@watsol.waterloo.edu>
|Message-Id: <9106251145.AA12407@watsol.waterloo.edu>
|To: sjmz@hplb.hpl.hp.com
|Subject: Re:  NOED has "arity"?
|
|I checked, and yes, the OED2 has 'arity', but the earliest citation 
|is from 'Fundamenta Mathematicae' in 1968, so Pereira is ahead there;
|he should drop a note to Oxford (or to me, I'm in touch with the right
|people).
|
|Cheers, Tim Bray

So, netters, Fernando Pereira's 1965 reference is already ahead of the New OED;
any earlier citations out there?  (Now that the source is held in electronic
SGML-tagged form and published on CD-ROM as well as paper, the potential
exists for the update cycle to be substantially shorter than the previous
50 years :-).  A reference including the publisher's name and location is
optimal.

Cheers, Stefek