Peter Landin
Peter Landin | |
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Peter John Landin (5 June 1930 – 3 June 2009[1][2]) was a British computer scientist. He was one of the first to realise that the lambda calculus could be used to model a programming language, an insight that is essential to the development of both functional programming and denotational semantics.
Academic
Landin was born in
At a workshop at the
He was active in the definition of the ALGOL programming language. He is listed among those who attended the November 1959 conference in Paris,[6] and the 1962 conference,[7][8] and cited by Tony Hoare as one of the people who taught him ALGOL 60 and hence facilitated his expression of powerful recursive algorithms:
"Around Easter 1961, a course on ALGOL 60 was offered in Brighton, England, with Peter Naur, Edsger W. Dijkstra, and Peter Landin as tutors. ... It was there that I first learned about recursive procedures and saw how to program the sorting method which I had earlier found such difficulty in explaining. It was there that I wrote the procedure, immodestly named QUICKSORT, on which my career as a computer scientist is founded. Due credit must be paid to the genius of the designers of ALGOL 60 who included recursion in their language and enabled me to describe my invention so elegantly to the world. I have regarded it as the highest goal of programming language design to enable good ideas to be elegantly expressed."[9]
Landin was involved with international standards in programming and informatics, as a member of the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP) IFIP Working Group 2.1 on Algorithmic Languages and Calculi,[10] which specified, maintains, and supports the programming languages ALGOL 60 and ALGOL 68.[11]
Landin is responsible for inventing the stack, environment, control, dump
(using the light syntax).Another phrase originating with Landin is "The next 700 ..." after his influential paper The next 700 programming languages.[13] "700" was chosen because Landin had read in the Journal of the ACM that there were already 700 programming languages in existence.[14] The paper opens with the quotation "... today ... 1,700 special programming languages used to 'communicate' in over 700 application areas."[15] 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.[16] This dry sense of humour is expressed in many of his papers.
Political
Landin, who was bisexual,[2] became involved with the Gay Liberation Front (GLF) during the early 1970s. He was once arrested as part of an anti-nuclear demonstration.[17] He was a dedicated cyclist and moved around London on his bike until it became physically impossible for him to do so.[citation needed]
Legacy
The Bodleian Library in Oxford holds an archive of material relating to Peter Landin.[18] Since 2010, there has been an Annual Peter Landin Semantics Seminar held annually each December in memory of Peter Landin and organized by the BCS-FACS Specialist Group on Formal Aspects of Computing Science.[19] The first seminar was delivered by the American computer scientist John C. Reynolds (1935–2013).[20] There is a Peter Landin Building at Queen Mary University of London housing teaching and research facilities for computer science.[21]
Selected publications
- Landin, Peter J. (1964). "The mechanical evaluation of expressions". .
- Landin, Peter J. (February 1965a). "Correspondence between ALGOL 60 and Church's Lambda-notation: part I". S2CID 6505810.
- Landin, Peter J. (March 1965b). "A correspondence between ALGOL 60 and Church's Lambda-notation: part II". S2CID 15781851.
- Landin, Peter J. (29 August 1965c). "A Generalization of Jumps and Labels". UNIVAC Systems Programming Research (Technical Report). Reprinted in Landin, Peter J. (December 1998). "A Generalization of Jumps and Labels". S2CID 5579841.
- Landin, Peter J. (1966a). Steel, T. B. Jr. (ed.). "A formal description of Algol 60". Formal Language Description Languages for Computer Programming: 266–294.
- Landin, Peter J. (March 1966b). "The next 700 programming languages". S2CID 13409665.
See also
Notes
- ^ Peter Landin, Lambda the Ultimate, 4 June 2009.
- ^ a b c Bornat 2009a
- OCLC 861966658.
- ISBN 978-0-13-729104-5.
- ^ Numerico, Teresa; Bowen, Jonathan P. (January–March 2002). "Program Verification and Semantics: The early work". IEEE Annals of the History of Computing. 24 (1): 90–92. Archived from the original on 26 September 2007.
- ^ "AB8 December 1959". December 1959. Archived from the original on 15 June 2009.
- ^ Backus, J. W.; Wegstein, J. H.; van Wijngaarden, A.; Woodger, M.; Naur, P.; Bauer, F. L.; Green, J.; Katz, C.; McCarthy, J.; Perlis, A. J.; Rutishauser, H.; Samelson, K.; Vauquois, B. (1 January 1963). "Revised Report on the Algorithmic Language Algol 60". mass:werk.
- ^ Landin 1964b
- C. Antony R. Hoare, 1980, Published in the Communications of the ACM.
- ^ Jeuring, Johan; Meertens, Lambert; Guttmann, Walter (17 August 2016). "Profile of IFIP Working Group 2.1". Foswiki. Retrieved 10 September 2020.
- ^ Swierstra, Doaitse; Gibbons, Jeremy; Meertens, Lambert (2 March 2011). "ScopeEtc: IFIP21: Foswiki". Foswiki. Retrieved 10 September 2020.
- ^ Diehl, Stephan; Hartel, Pieter; Sestoft, Peter (2000). "Abstract machines for programming language implementation". Future Generation Computer Systems. Vol. 16. pp. 739–751.
- ^ Landin 1966b
- ^ Personal communication, September 2007.
- ^ Computer Software Issues, an American Mathematical Association Prospectus, July 1965.
- ^ Landin 1965a
- ^ Bornat 2009b
- ^ "Archive of Peter Landin, computer scientist, academic and gay rights campaigner". Bodleian Archives & Manuscripts. UK: Bodleian Libraries, University of Oxford. Retrieved 3 August 2022.
- BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT. 2012. Retrieved 4 December 2012.
- BCS, The Chartered Institute for IT. 6 December 2010. Archived from the originalon 6 March 2012.
- ^ "Peter Landin Building". UK: Queen Mary University of London. Retrieved 13 December 2022.
Sources
- Bornat, Richard (23 September 2009). "Peter Landin obituary". The Guardian (Obituaries ed.). p. 34. Retrieved 29 September 2009.
- S2CID 8870097.
External links
- Peter J. Landin at DBLP Bibliography Server
- Program Verification and Semantics: The Early Work at the Science Museum, London, UK, 5 June 2001
- Memorial talk on Landin's life by ICFP2009
- Peter Landin's talk at Program Verification and Semantics: The Early Work, 2001 (video)