https://www.theregister.com/2024/01/04/niklaus_wirth_obituary/
"Swiss computer scientist Professor Niklaus Wirth died on New Year's Day,
roughly six weeks before what would have been his 90th birthday.
Wirth is justly celebrated as the creator of the Pascal programming language,
but that was only one step in a series of important languages and research
projects. Both asteroid 21655 and a law of computer design are named after him.
He won computer-science boffinry's highest possible gong, the Turing Award, in
1984, and that page has some short English-language clips from a 2018
interview.
Niklaus Emil Wirth was born in Wintherthur in Switzerland, the day after St
Valentine's Day 1934. In 1959 he got his bachelor's degree from ETH Zürich, to
which he returned later in life and from which much of his important research
emerged.
He changed countries several times in his life – his 1960 master's degree was
from the Université Laval in Canada, and his 1963 doctorate from UC Berkeley –
the home of Berkeley Unix, or BSD as it's usually known. He stayed in
California for the next four years as assistant professor of computer science
at Stanford University. During this time, he worked on his first two
programming languages: Euler in 1965, and PL/360, published in 1968.
Partly as a result of this work, he was invited into the Working Group planning
the next iteration of the ALGOL programming language, to replace ALGOL 60.
Along with British computer scientist Sir Tony Hoare, he presented a proposal
called ALGOL-W. However, this was rejected in favour of a more complex proposal
from Adriaan van Wijngaarden, which became ALGOL-68.
As described in C H Lindsey's
History of ALGOL-68, when the ALGOL-W proposal
was rejected, Wirth resigned from the committee, contributing a strong "Closing
Word" to the November 1968
Algol Bulletin 29, containing gems such as:
I pulled out my copy of the draft report on ALGOL-68 and showed it to her.
She fainted.
Instead, Wirth took his proposal, changed it to be somewhat less compatible
with ALGOL, and released it in 1970 under the name Pascal."
RIP,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
