Niklaus Wirth

Niklaus Wirth (Winterthur, Switzerland, February 15, 1934), computer scientist.

In 1959 he graduated as an Electronics Engineer at the Federal Polytechnic School of Zurich (ETH) in Switzerland. In 1960 he obtained an M.Sc. from Laval University, Canada. In 1963 he obtained a Doctorate (Ph.D.) from the University of California, Berkeley.

From 1963 to 1967 he served as Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University and again at the University of Zurich. Starting in 1968 he became Professor of Computer Science at ETH in Switzerland, taking two years off at Xerox PARC in California.

Wirth was the lead designer of the Euler, Algol W, Pascal, Modula, Modula-2, and Oberon programming languages. He also spent much of his time on the design and implementation team for the Lilith and Oberon operating systems for Lola in the design of the digital hardware and the simulation system.

His article "program development by stepwise refinement" is considered a classic text in software engineering, as is his book Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs, which received wide recognition, and is still useful in teaching programming today. He received the Turing Award for developing these programming languages in 1984. He retired in 1999.

Biography

Wirth was born in Winterthur, Switzerland, in 1934. In 1959, he earned a Bachelor of Science (B.S.) in electronic engineering from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in Zurich (ETH Zürich). In 1960, he earned a Master of Science (MSc) from Université Laval, Canada. Then, in 1963, he earned a Ph.D. in Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (EECS) from the University of California, Berkeley, supervised by computer design pioneer Harry Huskey.

From 1963 to 1967, he served as an assistant professor of computer science at Stanford University and again at the University of Zurich. Then, in 1968, he became Professor of Computer Science at ETH Zürich, taking two one-year sabbaticals at Xerox PARC in California (1976-1977 and 1984-1985). He retired in 1999.

Participated in the development of international standards in programming and computing, as a member of the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP) IFIP Working Group 2.1 on Algorithmic Languages and Calculations, which specifies, maintains, and supports programming languages. ALGOL 60 and ALGOL 68 programming.

In 2004, he was named a Fellow of the Computer History Museum "for his seminal work on programming languages and algorithms, including Euler, Algol-W, Pascal, Modula, and Oberon".

Programming languages

Wirth was the chief designer of the programming languages Euler (1965), PL360 (1966), ALGOL W (1966), Pascal (1970), [9] Modula (1975), Modula-2 (1978), Oberon (1987), Oberon-2 (1991) and Oberon-07 (2007). He was also an important part of the design and implementation team for the Medos-2 (1983, for the Lilith workstation) and Oberon (1987, for the Ceres workstation) operating systems and the Lola (1995) digital hardware system. design and simulation. In 1984, he received the Turing Award from the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) for the development of these languages. In 1994, he was admitted as a member of the ACM.

Posts

His book, co-authored with Kathleen Jensen, The Pascal User Manual and Report, served as the basis for many language implementation efforts in the 1970s and 1980s in the United States and throughout Europe.

His article Program Development by Stepwise Refinement, on teaching programming, is considered a classic text on software engineering. In 1975, he wrote the book Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs, which gained wide acclaim. Major revisions of this book under the new title Algorithms + Data Structures were published in 1985 and 2004. Examples in the first edition were written in Pascal. These were replaced in later editions with examples written in Modula-2 and Oberon respectively.

His textbook, Systematic Programming: An Introduction, was considered a good source for students who wanted to do more than just code. The cover flap of the sixth edition (1973) stated that the book "... is designed for the needs of people who see a course on the systematic construction of algorithms as part of their basic mathematical training, in place of immediate need". needs of those who wish to be able to occasionally code a problem and transfer it to their computer for instant solution". Considered a challenging text to work on, it was sought as imperative reading for those interested in numerical mathematics.

In 1992, he and Jürg Gutknecht published the complete documentation for the Oberon operating system. [14] A second book, with Martin Reiser, purported to be a programming guide. [fifteen]

Honours, Awards and Memberships (selection)

• 1984: Turing Awards
• 1988: IEEE Computer Pioneer Award
• 1988: IBM Europe Science and Technology Award
• 1995: Pour le mérite para las ciencias y las artes [1]
• 1999: ACM Sigsoft software engineering award
• 2001: Name of asteroid (21655) Niklauswirth
• 2002: Eduard Rhein Foundation Technology Award
• 2007: Election to the European Academy

A somewhat special prize is the name of a software to learn the programming language Pascal like " Niki - the robot " alluding to Niklaus.

Wirth is a member of the German Academy of Sciences and Engineering, Acatech [2]