Niklaus Wirth

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Niklaus Wirth
Wirth in 2005
Born
Niklaus Emil Wirth

(1934-02-15)15 February 1934
Winterthur, Switzerland
Died1 January 2024(2024-01-01) (aged 89)
Zürich, Switzerland
CitizenshipSwitzerland
Education
Known forALGOL W, Euler, Pascal, Modula, Modula-2, Oberon, Oberon-2, Oberon-07, Oberon System
Awards
Scientific career
FieldsComputer science
Institutions
ThesisA Generalization of Algol (1963)
Doctoral advisorHarry Huskey, Edward Feigenbaum
Doctoral studentsMartin Odersky, Michael Franz
Signature
Signature of Niklaus Wirth

Niklaus Emil Wirth (15 February 1934 – 1 January 2024) was a Swiss computer scientist. He designed several programming languages, including Pascal, and pioneered several classic topics in software engineering. In 1984, he won the Turing Award, generally recognized as the highest distinction in computer science, "for developing a sequence of innovative computer languages".[3]

Early life and education

Niklaus Emil Wirth was born in Winterthur, Switzerland, on 15 February 1934.[4]

He earned a Bachelor of Science (B.S.) degree in

electrical engineering and computer science (EECS) from the University of California, Berkeley, supervised by computer design pioneer Harry Huskey.[5]

Career

From 1963 to 1967, Wirth served as assistant professor of

Xerox PARC in California (1976–1977 and 1984–1985). He retired in 1999.[5]

Wirth was involved with developing international standards in programming and informatics, as a member of the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP) Working Group 2.1 on Algorithmic Languages and Calculi,[6] which specified, maintains, and supports the programming languages ALGOL 60 and ALGOL 68.[7]

In 2004, he was made a Fellow of the Computer History Museum "for seminal work in programming languages and algorithms, including Euler, Algol-W, Pascal, Modula, and Oberon."[8]

Programming languages

Wirth in 1969

Wirth was the chief designer of the

digital hardware design and simulation system.[14][15]

In 1984, Wirth received the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Turing Award for the development of these languages.[16] In 1994, he was inducted as a Fellow of the ACM.[17]

In 1999, he received the

ACM SIGSOFT Outstanding Research Award[18]

Wirth's law

Main article: Wirth's law

In 1995, he popularized the adage now named Wirth's law. In his 1995 paper "A Plea for Lean Software" he phrased it as "Software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware becomes faster." and attributed it to Martin Reiser.[19]

Publications

The April 1971 Communications of the ACM article "Program Development by Stepwise Refinement",

top-down method for designing programs.[23][24] The article was discussed by Fred Brooks in his influential book The Mythical Man-Month and was described as "seminal" in the ACM's brief biography of Wirth published in connection to his Turing Award.[25][26]

The 1973 textbook, Systematic Programming: An Introduction,[27] was described as a quality source for mathematicians desiring to understand the nature of programming in a 1974 review.[28] The cover flap, of the 1973 edition, stated the book "... is tailored to the needs of people who view a course on systematic construction of algorithms as part of their basic mathematical training, rather than to the immediate needs of those who wish to be able to occasionally encode a problem and hand it over to their computer for instant solution."[29] Described in the review as a challenging text to work through, it was nevertheless recommended as useful reading for those interested in numerical mathematics.[30]

In 1974, The Pascal User Manual and Report,[31] The Pascal User Manual and Report, jointly written[i] with Kathleen Jensen,[34] served as the basis of many language implementation efforts in the 1970s (BSD Pascal[35]), and 1980s in the United States and across Europe.[36][37]

In 1975, he wrote the book Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs, which gained wide recognition.[38] Major revisions of this book with the new title Algorithms & Data Structures were published in 1986 and 2004.[39][40] The examples in the first edition were written in Pascal. These were replaced in the later editions with examples written in Modula-2 and Oberon, respectively.[39][40]

In 1992, Wirth and Jürg Gutknecht published the full documentation of the Oberon operating system.[41] A second book, with Martin Reiser, was intended as a programming guide.[42]

Death

Wirth died on New Year's Day 2024, at age 89.[43]

See also

Notes

  1. ^ First chapter (Documentation) is a joint work, which according to Jensen has been edited by Wirth.[32] Second chapter is by Wirth (also published separately[33]).

References

  1. IEEE. Archived from the original
    (PDF) on 24 November 2010. Retrieved 20 March 2021.
  2. ^ "Niklaus Wirth 2004 Fellow". Computer History Museum. Archived from the original on 3 July 2019. Retrieved 1 December 2017.
  3. ^ "Niklaus E. Wirth - A.M. Turing Award Laureate". Association for Computing Machinery. 2019. Archived from the original on 29 June 2017. Retrieved 8 January 2024.
  4. ISBN 978-1-4381-1003-5
    .
  5. ^
    ISBN 978-3-932588-85-3
    .
  6. ^ Jeuring, Johan; Meertens, Lambert; Guttmann, Walter (17 August 2016). "Profile of IFIP Working Group 2.1". Foswiki. Archived from the original on 8 March 2021. Retrieved 4 October 2020.
  7. ^ Swierstra, Doaitse; Gibbons, Jeremy; Meertens, Lambert (2 March 2011). "ScopeEtc: IFIP21: Foswiki". Foswiki. Archived from the original on 2 September 2018. Retrieved 4 October 2020.
  8. ^ "Niklaus Wirth: 2004 Fellow". Computer History Museum (CHM). Archived from the original on 3 July 2019. Retrieved 15 October 2019.
  9. ISSN 0362-4331. Archived
    from the original on 9 March 2018. Retrieved 8 March 2018.
  10. ^ Wirth, Niklaus (3 May 2016). The Programming Language Oberon-07 (PDF). ETH Zurich, Department of Computer Science (Report). Archived (PDF) from the original on 21 January 2021. Retrieved 17 January 2021.
  11. hdl:20.500.11850/137906. Archived
    from the original on 4 January 2024. Retrieved 4 January 2024. I am indebted to Prof. N. Wirth for conceiving and coordinating the Lilith project, for giving me the opportunity to design and implement the operating system Medos-2, and for supervising this thesis.
  12. ISBN 978-3-932588-85-3
    .
  13. ^ Proven, Liam (29 March 2022). "The wild world of non-C operating systems". The Register. Retrieved 4 April 2024.
  14. ^ Wirth, Niklaus (1995). Digital Circuit Design. Springer.
  15. ISBN 978-3-932588-85-3
    . This class also inspired Niklaus to develop a simple yet powerful hardware description language called Lola. Niklaus has always built the systems he is either researching or teaching himself since he knows that this is the only way to keep an engineer honest and credible.
  16. ^ Haigh, Thomas (1984). "Niklaus E. Wirth". A. M. Turing Award. Association for Computing Machinery. Archived from the original on 19 September 2017. Retrieved 15 October 2019.
  17. ^ "ACM Fellows by year". acm.org. Archived from the original on 3 January 2024. Retrieved 3 January 2024.
  18. ^ "Outstanding Research Award". SIGSOFT. Retrieved 1 April 2024.
  19. S2CID 44803077
    .
  20. ^ Wirth, Program development by stepwise refinement, Communications of the ACM,. 14:221–227, ACM Press, 1971
  21. S2CID 11348419
    .
  22. ISBN 978-0-929306-08-7
    .
  23. ISBN 978-81-906116-3-3
    .
  24. ISBN 978-1-4842-3153-1
    .
  25. ISBN 978-0-201-00650-6
    .
  26. doi:10.1145/1283920.1283941
    .
  27. ISBN 0-13-880369-2
    .
  28. JSTOR 2005728
    .
  29. ISBN 0-13-880369-2
    .
  30. JSTOR 2005728
    .
  31. ^ Pascal User Manual and Report Second Edition.
  32. ^ "Kathleen Jensen's Speech at the Wirth Symposium (20.02.2014)". YouTube. Archived from the original on 6 January 2024. Retrieved 6 January 2024.
  33. hdl:20.500.11850/68910
    .
  34. ^ * https://www.researchgate.net/scientific-contributions/Kathleen-Jensen-2058521472 Archived 6 January 2024 at the Wayback Machine
  35. ^ Joy, William N.; Graham, Susan L.; Haley, Charles B. (1979). Berkeley Pascal User's Manual, Version 1.1, April, 1979. University of California, Berkeley. Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences. Archived from the original on 8 January 2024. Retrieved 8 January 2024.
  36. ^ Blotnick, Srully (July 1983). "Don't Fail Me Now" (PDF). Pascal News (26): 26. Archived (PDF) from the original on 5 January 2024. Retrieved 3 January 2024.
  37. ^ Hartel, Pieter H. (May 1982). "Pascal for systems programmers" (PDF). ECODU-32. Archived (PDF) from the original on 22 March 2020. Retrieved 3 January 2024.
  38. ^ Citations collected by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM)
  39. ^
    ISBN 978-0-13-022005-9
    . The major change which pervades the entire text concerns the programming language used to express the algorithms. Pascal has been replaced by Modula-2.
  40. ^ a b Wirth, Niklaus. "Algorithms and Data Structures" (PDF). ETH Zürich. Archived (PDF) from the original on 17 April 2021. Retrieved 4 January 2024. © N. Wirth 1985 (Oberon version: August 2004).
  41. ISBN 978-0-201-54428-2. Archived from the original (PDF) on 12 April 2013. Out of print. Online version of a 2nd edition Archived 5 April 2014 at the Wayback Machine. 2005 edition, PDF. Archived 8 July 2021 at the Wayback Machine
  42. ISBN 978-0-201-56543-0. Archived from the original
    (PDF) on 16 April 2016. Retrieved 1 June 2017.. Out of print.
  43. ^ Proven, Liam (4 January 2024). "RIP: Software design pioneer and Pascal creator Niklaus Wirth". The Register. Archived from the original on 7 January 2024. Retrieved 6 January 2024.

Further reading

External links

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