Charles Leonard Hamblin

Charles Leonard Hamblin ( * 1922; † 14 May 1985) was an Australian philosopher, logician and computer pioneer, and Professor of Philosophy at the University of Technology (now University ) of New South Wales in Sydney. Among his most famous achievements in the field of computer science include the introduction (some sources also my invention ) of the Reverse Polish Notation and - independently of and at about the same with Friedrich L. Bauer and Klaus Samelson - the invention of the stack. Hamblin's most famous contribution to philosophy is his book Fallacies, to this day a standard work in the field of fallacies.

Life and work

After - by the Second World War and the radar service interrupted at the Royal Australian Air Force - the study of mathematics, physics and philosophy at the University of Melbourne Hamblin received his doctorate in 1957 at the London School of Economics. From 1955 he was the first lecturer, and finally to his death professor of philosophy at the former Technical University of New South Wales.

In the second half of the 1950s Hamblin has been active on the third computer available in Australia, a copy of the DEUCE (acronym for Digital Electronic Universal Computing Engine, " digital, electronic universal computing machine "), a (later merged into Marconi and British Aerospace ) of the English Electric company produced commercial version of the Alan Turing significantly mitgeplanten ACE. For the DEUCE Hamblin designed one of the first programming languages ​​in general, which based on Reverse Polish Notation GEORGE (acronym for General Order Generator, " general flow generator " ), together with the associated compiler ( language translator ), who formulated in GEORGE programs into the machine language of the computer translated.

Hamblin's work will be regarded as the first actual employment with Reverse Polish Notation, which is why he is often referred to as the inventor of this presentation. Regardless of the question of whether the Reverse Polish Notation as an independent representation, or - as Hamblin himself - regarded as a variant of the ordinary Polish notation already between 1920 and 1930 developed by the Polish logician and philosopher January Łukasiewicz (and whether Łukasiewicz himself, which is close, has seen both versions ), Hamblin is at any rate the merit of having recognized the advantage of reverse polish notation in processing on programmable computers and algorithms specified for this purpose.

The second immediate result of the study of the development of compilers was the concept of the stack, the Hamblin developed independently by Friedrich L. Bauer and Klaus Samelson, where in 1957 a patent for the use of a stack for the translation of programming languages ​​has been granted. In the same year - 1957 - Hamblin presented his stack concept in the first Australian computer conference. Hamblin's work gave the impetus for the development of stack-based computer, the machine instructions relate their arguments from a stack and put the result back on this stack.

In the 1960s, Hamblin philosophical questions began again increasingly turn to. In addition to an influential introductory book in formal logic to be applicable today as the standard work and befindliches in printing Fallacies, the treatment of fallacies by the traditional logic is devoted to and which he called the formal dialectic to life arose. Likewise Hamblin is one of the founders of modern temporal logic ( temporal logic ) and the modern logic question.

Writings

Monographs

  • Language and the Theory of Information. Dissertation. University of London, October 1956
  • Elementary Formal Logic: Programmed Course. Methuen, London 1967, ISBN 0-416-69820-4
  • Fallacies. Methuen, London, 1970, ISBN 0-416-14570-1 and ISBN 0-416-70070-5 ( paperback ); Reprint Vale Press, 2004, ISBN 0-916475-24-7 ( paperback ) - still a standard work on the subject
  • Imperatives. Blackwell, Oxford, 1987, ISBN 0-631-15193-1

Influential articles

  • At Addressless Coding Scheme Based on Mathematical notation. In: WRE Conference on Computing, Proceedings. Weapons Research Establishment, Salisbury 1957
  • Computer Languages ​​. In: The Australian Journal of Science. 20, 1957, pp. 135-139. Reprinted in The Australian Computer Journal. 17/4, November 1985, pp. 195-198
  • GEORGE, on Addressless Coding Scheme for DEUCE. In: Australian National Committee on Computation and Automatic Control, Summarized Proceedings of First Conference. Paper C6.1, 1960
  • Translation to and from Polish Notation. In: The Computer Journal. 5/3, October 1962, pp. 210-213
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