Niklaus Wirth | |
|---|---|
 Wirth in 2005 | |
| Born | Niklaus Emil Wirth (1934-02-15)15 February 1934 Winterthur, Switzerland |
| Died | 1 January 2024(2024-01-01) (aged 89) Zürich, Switzerland |
| Education | |
| Known for | ALGOL W,Euler,Pascal,Modula,Modula-2,Oberon,Oberon-2,Oberon-07,Oberon System |
| Children | 3[3] |
| Awards |
|
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Computer science |
| Institutions | |
| Thesis | A Generalization of Algol (1963) |
| Doctoral advisor | Harry Huskey,Edward Feigenbaum |
| Doctoral students | Martin Odersky,Michael Franz |
| Signature | |
 | |
Niklaus Emil Wirth (IPA:/vɛrt/) (15 February 1934 – 1 January 2024) was a Swisscomputer scientist. He designed severalprogramming languages, includingPascal, and pioneered several classic topics in software engineering. In 1984, he won theTuring Award, generally recognized as the highest distinction incomputer science, "for developing a sequence of innovative computer languages".[4]
Niklaus Emil Wirth was born inWinterthur, Switzerland, on 15 February 1934.[5] He was the son of Hedwig (née Keller) and Walter Wirth, a high school teacher.[6] Wirth studiedelectronic engineering at theFederal Institute of Technology, Zürich (ETH Zürich) from 1954 to 1958, graduating with a Bachelor of Science (B.S.) degree.[6] In 1960, he earned a Master of Science (M.Sc.) fromUniversité Laval inQuebec.[6] Then in 1963, he was awarded a PhD inelectrical engineering and computer science (EECS) from theUniversity of California, Berkeley, supervised by computer design pioneerHarry Huskey.[7]
From 1963 to 1967, Wirth served as assistant professor ofcomputer science atStanford University and again at theUniversity of Zürich.[6] In 1968, he became a professor ofinformatics at ETH Zürich, taking two one-year sabbaticals atXerox PARC in California (1976–1977 and 1984–1985). He retired in 1999.[7]
Although Wirth was involved with developinginternational standards in programming and informatics, as a member of theInternational Federation for Information Processing (IFIP)Working Group 2.1 on Algorithmic Languages and Calculi,[8] whichspecified, maintains, and supports theprogramming languagesALGOL 60 andALGOL 68,[9] he got frustrated by the discussions in the standards groups and published his languages later on as personal work, mainlyPascal,Modula-2 andOberon.
In 2004, he was made a Fellow of theComputer History Museum "for seminal work in programming languages and algorithms, including Euler, Algol-W, Pascal, Modula, and Oberon."[10]
Wirth was the chief designer of the programming languagesEuler (1965),PL360 (1966),ALGOL W (1966), Pascal (1970),[11]Modula (1975), Modula-2 (1978),[7] Oberon (1987),Oberon-2 (1991), andOberon-07 (2007).[12] He was also a major part of the design and implementation team for the operating systems Medos-2 (1983, for theLilithworkstation),[13] andOberon (1987, for theCeres workstation),[14][15] and for theLola (1995)digital hardware design and simulation system.[16][17]
In 1984, Wirth received theAssociation for Computing Machinery (ACM)Turing Award for the development of these languages.[18] In 1994, he was inducted as a Fellow of the ACM.[19]
In 1999, he received theACM SIGSOFT Outstanding Research Award[20]
In 1995, he popularized the adage now namedWirth's law. In his 1995 paper "A Plea for Lean Software" he attributed the following to Martin Reiser phrasing it as, "Software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware becomes faster."[21]
The April 1971Communications of the ACM article "Program Development by Stepwise Refinement",[22][23] concerning the teaching of programming, is considered to be a classic text in software engineering.[24] The paper is considered to be the earliest work to formally outline thetop-down method for designing programs.[25][26] The article was discussed byFred Brooks in his influential bookThe Mythical Man-Month and was described as "seminal" in the ACM's brief biography of Wirth published in connection to his Turing Award.[27][28]
The 1973 textbook,Systematic Programming: An Introduction,[29] was described as a quality source for mathematicians desiring to understand the nature of programming in a 1974 review.[30] The cover flap, of the 1973 edition, stated the book "... is tailored to the needs of people who view a course on systematic construction of algorithms as part of their basic mathematical training, rather than to the immediate needs of those who wish to be able to occasionally encode a problem and hand it over to their computer for instant solution."[31] Described in the review as a challenging text to work through, it was nevertheless recommended as useful reading for those interested in numerical mathematics.[32]
In 1974,The Pascal User Manual and Report,[33] jointly written[i] withKathleen Jensen,[36] served as the basis of many language implementation efforts in the 1970s (BSD Pascal[37]), and 1980s in the United States and across Europe.[38][39]
In 1975, he wrote the bookAlgorithms + Data Structures = Programs, which gained wide recognition.[40] Major revisions of this book with the new titleAlgorithms & Data Structures were published in 1986 and 2004.[41][42] The examples in the first edition were written in Pascal. These were replaced in the later editions with examples written in Modula-2 and Oberon, respectively.[41][42]
In 1992, Wirth andJürg Gutknecht published the full documentation of the Oberon operating system.[43] A second book, with Martin Reiser, was intended as a programming guide.[44]
Wirth died in Zürich on New Year's Day 2024, at age 89.[6][45]
[his family] includes two girls and a boy
I am indebted to Prof. N. Wirth for conceiving and coordinating the Lilith project, for giving me the opportunity to design and implement the operating system Medos-2, and for supervising this thesis.
This class also inspired Niklaus to develop a simple yet powerful hardware description language called Lola. Niklaus has always built the systems he is either researching or teaching himself since he knows that this is the only way to keep an engineer honest and credible.
The major change which pervades the entire text concerns the programming language used to express the algorithms. Pascal has been replaced byModula-2.
© N. Wirth 1985 (Oberon version: August 2004).
 | This February 2024'suse ofexternal links may not follow Wikipedia's policies or guidelines. Pleaseimprove this article by removingexcessive orinappropriate external links, and converting useful links where appropriate intofootnote references.(February 2024) (Learn how and when to remove this message) |
Media from Commons
Quotations from Wikiquote
| Software |
| ||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Workstations | |||||||||
| Workplaces |
| ||||||||
| Collaborators | |||||||||
| Awards |
| ||||||||
Pascal programming language family | |||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Dialects | .jpg) | ||||
| Compilers |
| ||||
| API | |||||
| Microcomputer | |||||
| Comparisons | |||||
| Designer | |||||
| Modula |
| ||||||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Oberon |
| ||||||||||||||||
| Fields |
| ||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Concepts |
| ||||||
| Orientations | |||||||
| Models |
| ||||||
| Related fields | |||||||
| International | |
|---|---|
| National | |
| Academics | |
| People | |
| Other | |
