Eugene Edward McDonnell | |
|---|---|
 Eugene McDonnell in 1978 | |
| Born | (1926-10-18)October 18, 1926 |
| Died | August 17, 2010(2010-08-17) (aged 83) |
| Citizenship | United States |
| Alma mater | University of Kentucky Harvard University |
| Known for | Programming languages:APL,J |
| Spouse | Jeanne Farr McDonnell |
| Children | 5 |
| Awards | Kenneth E. Iverson Award for Outstanding Contribution to APL, 1987 |
| Scientific career | |
| Fields | Computer science |
| Institutions | Western Union IBM I. P. Sharp Associates |
Eugene Edward McDonnell (October 18, 1926 – August 17, 2010) was acomputer science pioneer and long-time contributor to theprogramming language siblingsAPL andJ.
He was a graduate ofBrooklyn Technical High School. After serving as aninfantrycorporal in theU.S. Army inWorld War II, he attended theUniversity of Kentucky, graduating in 1949summa cum laude, and was elected toPhi Beta Kappa. He was awarded a First Year Graduate Fellowship toHarvard University, where he studiedcomparative literature, particularlyDante'sDivine Comedy.
Studying the poems ofRobert Frost, he noticed that the first two poems in Frost's bookWest-Running Brook, "Spring Pools" and "The Freedom of the Moon", not only discuss reflecting, but the rhyme schemes of the two reflect each other: AABCBC and CBCBAA. When he met Frost, he was delighted to find that they had both committed the 193 lines ofJohn Milton's "Lycidas" to memory.
His first work atIBM was in the design of IBM's firsttime-sharing system, which became a very early host to IVSYS (for Iverson system), a predecessor of APL. In 1968, he became a colleague ofKen Iverson, used Iverson notation before APL was named, and was active in the very earliest days of APL. He holdsU.S. patent 3,400,376 (3 September 1968) "Information Transfer Control System" allowing communication between two users. In 1978, he left IBM and joinedI. P. Sharp Associates, retiring therefrom in 1990.
At IBM, McDonnell devised the notation for thesignum andcircle functions in APL, designed thecomplexfloor function, and proposed the extension ofor andand toGCD andLCM. With Iverson he was responsible for includinghooks and forks in J. The result of zero divided by zero in J is as he proposed in 1976. In 1987, he won theIverson Award.
McDonnell was the publisher of the APL Press, producing "A Source Book in APL" and "APL Quote Quad, the Early Years". He was the editor and principal contributor of the Recreational APL column inAPL Quote-Quad for many years. He wrote dozens of the "At Play with J" columns inVector, the journal of the British APL Association.[1] He contributed toSloane'sOn-Line Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences.
He was a member of theJane Austen Society of North America (JASNA), and gave a talk "Classical Persuasion" at the JASNA meeting at Lake Louise in 1993. He was active in the Bay area Jane Austen group, and wrote a topical index to the Dierdre Le Faye edition of Austen's letters, which can be seen at theRepublic of Pemberley website.[2]
McDonnell died peacefully at his home in Palo Alto on August 17, 2010.[3]
| Features | _logo.svg){kind=logo} | ||||||||||||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Implementations |
| ||||||||||||
| Community |
| ||||||||||||
| |||||||||||||
