|
Peter John Landin (5 June 1930, Sheffield – 3 June 2009〔(Peter Landin ), ''(Lambda the Ultimate )'', 4 June 2009.〕) was a British computer scientist. He was one of the first to realize that the lambda calculus could be used to model a programming language, an insight that is essential to development of both functional programming and denotational semantics. == Academic == Landin was born in Sheffield, where he attended King Edward VII School; he graduated from Clare College, Cambridge University.〔 From 1960 to 1964, he was the assistant to Christopher Strachey when the latter was an independent computer consultant in London. Most of his work was published during this period and the brief time he worked for Univac and at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in the United States before taking a position at Queen Mary, University of London. During the 1970s and 1980s, his efforts went into building the Computer Science department in Queen Mary College, developing courses and teaching students.〔Acknowledged in the foreword to the text book ''Programming from First Principles'' by Richard Bornat. Published by Prentice Hall, 1987. ISBN 978-0-13-729104-5.〕 On his retirement, he was appointed Emeritus Professor of Theoretical Computation at Queen Mary, University of London, where in 2012 the Computer Science building was renamed the Peter Landin Building in his honour. At a workshop at the Science Museum, London, in 2001, on the history of programming semantics he spoke of how his scholarly career in computer science began in the late 1950s and of how he was much influenced by a study of McCarthy's LISP when the most commonly used language was Fortran.〔, 2001.〕 He was active in the definition of the ALGOL programming language〔Listed amongst those who attended the November 1959 conference in () () and the 1962 conference ().〕 and cited by Tony Hoare as one of the people who taught him ALGOL 60 and hence facilitated his expression of powerful recursive algorithms:
Landin is responsible for inventing the SECD machine, the first abstract process virtual machine ever defined, and the ISWIM programming language, defining the Landin ''off-side rule'' and for coining the term ''syntactic sugar''. The off-side rule allows bounding scope declaration by use of white spaces as seen in languages such as Miranda, Haskell, Python and F# (using the "light" syntax). Another phrase originating with Landin is "The next 700 ..." after his influential paper ''The next 700 programming languages''. "700" was chosen because Landin had read in the ''Journal of the ACM'' that there were already 700 programming languages in existence.〔Personal communication, September 2007.〕 The paper opens with the quotation "... today ... 1,700 special programming languages used to 'communicate' in over 700 application areas."〔Computer Software Issues, an American Mathematical Association Prospectus, July 1965.〕 It also includes the joke that A possible first step in the research program is 1700 doctoral theses called "A Correspondence between ''x'' and Church's λ-notation."a reference to his earlier paper. This dry sense of humour is expressed in many of his papers. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Peter Landin」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
|