Peter Landin

Peter John Landin ( born June 5, 1930 in Sheffield, † 3 June 2009) was a British computer scientist. He was one of the pioneers of computer science, whose works from the early 1960s, exerted a profound influence on the development of programming languages. They drew attention to the, applicative core ' of programming languages ​​, an insight of great importance for the development of functional programming languages ​​and denotational semantics.

Peter Landin studied at the University of Cambridge. From 1960 to 1964 he was an assistant of Christopher Strachey, who was at that time freelance IT consultant in London. Most of his publications date from this period and the short time in which he worked in the United States at Univac. After that he was appointed to the Queen Mary College, University of London and commissioned the construction of the computer science there. To this he devoted himself in the 1970s and 1980s, developed courses and taught theoretical computer science. Even after his retirement, he remained in college as a teacher receive.

At a conference on the history of the semantics of programs at the Science Museum in London in 2001, he reported from the beginning of his scientific career in computer science in the late 1950s, and how much he was influenced by the study of John McCarthy's LISP programming language, and it was the most common programming language at a time, as Fortran.

He took an active part in the definition of the programming language ALGOL. and wrote one of the first formal descriptions of this programming language. Tony Hoare describes him as one of the people who taught him Algol 60 and so the formulation of powerful recursive algorithms allowing him:

Landin is also responsible for the invention of the SECD machine and the programming language ISWIM, also invented the off -side rule (actually offside rule ) for programming languages ​​and the term syntactic sugar. The off -side rule allows you to define sections within programs through the use of whitespace and is used among other things in the languages ​​Miranda, Haskell and Python.

Another way of speaking, which goes back to Landin 's "The Next 700 ... " after his momentous work The next 700 programming languages ​​. The number 700 had Landin chosen because he had read in a report of the American Mathematical Association that it was at that time already in 1700 programming languages ​​to communicate in more than 700 applications to '. With the programming language ISWIM which he designed in this paper, he would have created as it were 700 programming languages ​​in one fell swoop, as ISWIM should be added as a core to each application-specific elements. It also contains the jocular remark

An allusion to his earlier work. This type of dry humor found in many of his publications.

Important publications

• The mechanical evaluation of expressions. The Computer Journal, vol 6 (1964 ), no 4, pp. 308-320
• A correspondence in between ALGOL 60 and Church 's lambda notation. Commun. ACM 8, 89-101, 158-165.
• The next 700 programming languages ​​. Commun. ACM 9, 3, 157-166.