• Alfred Aho named joint recipient of 2020 ACM Turing Award

    From Bruce Horrocks@21:1/5 to All on Thu Apr 1 18:27:43 2021
    from <https://www.acm.org/media-center/2021/march/turing-award-2020>

    "A.M. TURING AWARD HONORS INNOVATORS WHO SHAPED THE FOUNDATIONS OF
    PROGRAMMING LANGUAGE COMPILERS AND ALGORITHMS

    Columbia's Aho and Stanford's Ullman Developed Tools and Fundamental
    Textbooks Used by Millions of Software Programmers around the World

    New York, NY, March 31, 2021 – ACM, the Association for Computing
    Machinery, today named Alfred Vaino Aho and Jeffrey David Ullman
    recipients of the 2020 ACM A.M. Turing Award for fundamental algorithms
    and theory underlying programming language implementation and for
    synthesizing these results and those of others in their highly
    influential books, which educated generations of computer scientists.
    Aho is the Lawrence Gussman Professor Emeritus of Computer Science at
    Columbia University. Ullman is the Stanford W. Ascherman Professor
    Emeritus of Computer Science at Stanford University.

    Computer software powers almost every piece of technology with which we interact. Virtually every program running our world—from those on our
    phones or in our cars to programs running on giant server farms inside
    big web companies—is written by humans in a higher-level programming
    language and then compiled into lower-level code for execution. Much of
    the technology for doing this translation for modern programming
    languages owes its beginnings to Aho and Ullman.

    Beginning with their collaboration at Bell Labs in 1967 and continuing
    for several decades, Aho and Ullman have shaped the foundations of
    programming language theory and implementation, as well as algorithm
    design and analysis. They made broad and fundamental contributions to
    the field of programming language compilers through their technical contributions and influential textbooks. Their early joint work in
    algorithm design and analysis techniques contributed crucial approaches
    to the theoretical core of computer science that emerged during this period.

    ...

    --
    Bruce Horrocks
    Surrey, England
    (bruce at scorecrow dot com)

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  • From Janis Papanagnou@21:1/5 to Bruce Horrocks on Fri Apr 2 02:05:54 2021
    Wow, acknowledgement after so many decades. I just recently mentioned
    them in comp.unix.shell as having been influential to me in language
    and compiler topics and in 2014 I also mentioned them in a post here
    in comp.lang.awk. But what I am wondering about is why just these two
    were honored; in the area of formal languages and compiler construction
    I always had a gang of four influential persons in mind: Aho, Hopcroft,
    Sethi, and Ullman. In various combinations they published excellent
    books in that area, as far as my faint memories remember it correctly.

    Janis


    On 01.04.2021 19:27, Bruce Horrocks wrote:
    from <https://www.acm.org/media-center/2021/march/turing-award-2020>

    "A.M. TURING AWARD HONORS INNOVATORS WHO SHAPED THE FOUNDATIONS OF PROGRAMMING LANGUAGE COMPILERS AND ALGORITHMS

    Columbia's Aho and Stanford's Ullman Developed Tools and Fundamental Textbooks Used by Millions of Software Programmers around the World

    New York, NY, March 31, 2021 – ACM, the Association for Computing Machinery, today named Alfred Vaino Aho and Jeffrey David Ullman
    recipients of the 2020 ACM A.M. Turing Award for fundamental algorithms
    and theory underlying programming language implementation and for synthesizing these results and those of others in their highly
    influential books, which educated generations of computer scientists.
    Aho is the Lawrence Gussman Professor Emeritus of Computer Science at Columbia University. Ullman is the Stanford W. Ascherman Professor
    Emeritus of Computer Science at Stanford University.

    Computer software powers almost every piece of technology with which we interact. Virtually every program running our world—from those on our phones or in our cars to programs running on giant server farms inside
    big web companies—is written by humans in a higher-level programming language and then compiled into lower-level code for execution. Much of
    the technology for doing this translation for modern programming
    languages owes its beginnings to Aho and Ullman.

    Beginning with their collaboration at Bell Labs in 1967 and continuing
    for several decades, Aho and Ullman have shaped the foundations of programming language theory and implementation, as well as algorithm
    design and analysis. They made broad and fundamental contributions to
    the field of programming language compilers through their technical contributions and influential textbooks. Their early joint work in
    algorithm design and analysis techniques contributed crucial approaches
    to the theoretical core of computer science that emerged during this
    period.

    ...


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    * Origin: fsxNet Usenet Gateway (21:1/5)