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About the Authors

Walt Brainerd

Walt Brainerd received the third Ph.D. in computing sciences awarded in the United States. He has taught at Columbia University and the University of New Mexico and worked for Burroughs and the Los Alamos National Laboratory.

Walt has been a member of the Fortran national and international standards committees for more than 20 years. He served as director of technical work for X3J3 during the development of Fortran 90 and was the document editor.

He is currently President of Unicomp, Inc., which specializes in consulting and training in high performance computing. He maintains the definitive Web site for information about Fortran (http://www.fortran.com/fortran) and can be reached at walt@fortran.com.

Ron Cytron

Ron Cytron received a B.S. in electrical engineering from Rice University in 1980. His graduate studies at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign resulted in an M.S. in 1982 and a Ph.D. in 1984, both in computer science. Ron joined the Parallel Translation (PTRAN) project at the IBM Research Division, Thomas J. Watson Research Center in 1984, where he investigated various aspects of program analysis and optimization, with an emphasis on parallel architectures. His research there also included algorithms for constructing and using Static Single Assignment (SSA) form, an intermediate representation now in widespread use. Ron joined the staff of Washington University in 1991 and is now an associate professor in the Computer Science Department.

His research interests include program analysis, optimization, and transformation; optimization of object-oriented languages; intermediate representations; network software; and electronic voting systems.

Ralph E. Griswold

Ralph E. Griswold received his Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Stanford University in 1962. From then until 1970, he was a member of the technical staff at Bell Laboratories, where he became head of the Programming Research and Development Department and led the group that designed and implemented the SNOBOL programming languages.

In 1971 he moved to the University of Arizona, where he founded the Department of Computer Science. His work on programming languages continued, leading to the SL5 and Icon programming languages. He presently is Regents’ Professor Emeritus.

Glenn Grotzinger

Glenn Grotzinger is a graduate of Central Missouri State University in computer information science. He is currently programming COBOL on a temporary basis.

Dennis M. Ritchie

Dennis M. Ritchie is head of the System Software Research Department in the Computing Science Research Center of Bell Labs, the research and development arm of Lucent Technologies.

Ritchie received his bachelor’s and advanced degrees in physics and applied mathematics from Harvard University. The subject of his 1968 doctoral thesis was subrecursive hierarchies of functions.

Ritchie joined Bell Laboratories in 1967, where he contributed to the Multics project. Subsequently, he aided Ken Thompson in creating the UNIX operating system. After UNIX had become well established in the Bell System and in a number of educational, government, and commercial installations, Ritchie and Steven C. Johnson transported the operating system to another hardware architecture, thus demonstrating its portability and laying the groundwork for the widespread growth of the UNIX system. The Seventh Edition system from the Bell Laboratories research group contributed to the development of what has now become UNIX System V and was the basis for the Berkeley system distributions.

Early in the development of UNIX, Ritchie added data types and new syntax to Thompson’s B language, thus producing the new language C. This language is the foundation for the portability of UNIX, and it has become widely used in other contexts as well.

Steve Summit

Steve Summit is a software engineer specializing in C and UNIX, which he has enjoyed using for approximately 15 years. He is the author of the comprehensive Internet FAQ list on C. He currently lives, writes, teaches, and works in Seattle, Washington.

About the Series Editor

Peter H. Salus

Peter H. Salus is the author of A Quarter Century of UNIX (1994) and Casting the Net: From ARPANET to Internet and Beyond (1995). He is an internationally recognized expert and has been the keynote speaker at Uniforum Canada, the UKUUG, the NLUUG, and the OTA (Belgium) in the past few years. He has been executive director of the USENIX Association and of the Sun User Group and vice president of the Free Software Foundation. He was the managing editor of Computing Systems (MIT Press) from 1987 to 1996. He writes on a variety of computing topics in a number of magazines. His Ph.D. in linguistics (New York University, 1963) has led him from natural languages to computer languages.

Dedication

This Handbook is dedicated to John Backus, James Gosling, Adele Goldberg, Ralph Griswold, Brian Kernighan, John McCarthy, Bertrand Meyer, Dennis Ritchie, Bjarne Stroustrup, and the memory of Joe Ossanna, without whose efforts most of these languages wouldn’t exist.

Acknowledgments

Many individuals deserve mention where this enormous Handbook is concerned. First of all, Tom Stone, who abetted my thinking and then effected a contract prior to deserting me for another publisher; next, Jim LeValley and Don Fowley at Macmillan, for being willing to take a chance on this project. I’d also like to thank Linda Engelman, Tracy Hughes, Amy Lewis, Jane Brownlow, Karen Wachs, and Kitty Jarrett at Macmillan.

In addition to the many authors, I’d like to thank Lou Katz, Stuart McRobert, Len Tower, and Brent Welch for their advice, patience, and friendship.

My gratitude to the ACM, to Addison-Wesley Longman, to MIT Press, to O’Reilly & Associates, and to the Waite Group for permissions to reprint various materials is enormous.

The errors and omissions are mine.


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