Rod Burstall
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Rod Burstall
Rodney Martineau "Rod" Burstall FRSE (born 1934) is a British computer scientist and one of four founders of the Laboratory for Foundations of Computer Science at the University of Edinburgh. Biography Burstall studied physics at the University of Cambridge, then an M.Sc. in operational research at Birmingham University. He worked for three years before returning to Birmingham University to earn a Ph.D. in 1966 with thesis titled ''Heuristic and Decision Tree Methods on Computers: Some Operational Research Applications'' under the supervision of N. A. Dudley and K. B. Haley. Burstall was an early and influential proponent of functional programming, pattern matching, and list comprehension, and is known for his work with Robin Popplestone on POP, an innovative programming language developed at Edinburgh around 1970, and later work with John Darlington on NPL and program transformation and with David MacQueen and Don Sannella on Hope, a precursor to Standard ML, Miranda, ...
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Liverpool
Liverpool is a city and metropolitan borough in Merseyside, England. With a population of in 2019, it is the 10th largest English district by population and its metropolitan area is the fifth largest in the United Kingdom, with a population of 2.24 million. On the eastern side of the Mersey Estuary, Liverpool historically lay within the ancient hundred of West Derby in the county of Lancashire. It became a borough in 1207, a city in 1880, and a county borough independent of the newly-created Lancashire County Council in 1889. Its growth as a major port was paralleled by the expansion of the city throughout the Industrial Revolution. Along with general cargo, freight, and raw materials such as coal and cotton, merchants were involved in the slave trade. In the 19th century, Liverpool was a major port of departure for English and Irish emigrants to North America. It was also home to both the Cunard and White Star Lines, and was the port of registry of the ocean li ...
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Operational Research
Operations research ( en-GB, operational research) (U.S. Air Force Specialty Code: Operations Analysis), often shortened to the initialism OR, is a discipline that deals with the development and application of analytical methods to improve decision-making. It is considered to be a subfield of mathematical sciences. The term management science is occasionally used as a synonym. Employing techniques from other mathematical sciences, such as modeling, statistics, and optimization, operations research arrives at optimal or near-optimal solutions to decision-making problems. Because of its emphasis on practical applications, operations research has overlap with many other disciplines, notably industrial engineering. Operations research is often concerned with determining the extreme values of some real-world objective: the maximum (of profit, performance, or yield) or minimum (of loss, risk, or cost). Originating in military efforts before World War II, its techniques have grown to co ...
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Royal Society Of Edinburgh
The Royal Society of Edinburgh is Scotland's national academy of science and letters. It is a registered charity that operates on a wholly independent and non-partisan basis and provides public benefit throughout Scotland. It was established in 1783. , there are around 1,800 Fellows. The Society covers a broader selection of fields than the Royal Society of London, including literature and history. Fellowship includes people from a wide range of disciplines – science & technology, arts, humanities, medicine, social science, business, and public service. History At the start of the 18th century, Edinburgh's intellectual climate fostered many clubs and societies (see Scottish Enlightenment). Though there were several that treated the arts, sciences and medicine, the most prestigious was the Society for the Improvement of Medical Knowledge, commonly referred to as the Medical Society of Edinburgh, co-founded by the mathematician Colin Maclaurin in 1731. Maclaurin was unhappy ...
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Haskell (programming Language)
Haskell () is a general-purpose, statically-typed, purely functional programming language with type inference and lazy evaluation. Designed for teaching, research and industrial applications, Haskell has pioneered a number of programming language features such as type classes, which enable type-safe operator overloading, and monadic IO. Haskell's main implementation is the Glasgow Haskell Compiler (GHC). It is named after logician Haskell Curry. Haskell's semantics are historically based on those of the Miranda programming language, which served to focus the efforts of the initial Haskell working group. The last formal specification of the language was made in July 2010, while the development of GHC continues to expand Haskell via language extensions. Haskell is used in academia and industry. , Haskell was the 28th most popular programming language by Google searches for tutorials, and made up less than 1% of active users on the GitHub source code repository. History ...
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Miranda (programming Language)
Miranda is a lazy, purely functional programming language designed by David Turner as a successor to his earlier programming languages SASL and KRC, using some concepts from ML and Hope. It was produced by Research Software Ltd. of England (which holds a trademark on the name ''Miranda'') and was the first purely functional language to be commercially supported. Miranda was first released in 1985 as a fast interpreter in C for Unix-flavour operating systems, with subsequent releases in 1987 and 1989. It had a strong influence on the later Haskell programming language. In 2020 a version of Miranda was released as open source under a BSD licence. The codebase has been updated to conform to modern C standards (C11/ C18) and to generate 64-bit binaries. This has been tested on operating systems including Debian, Ubuntu, WSL/Ubuntu, and MacOS (Catalina). Overview Miranda is a lazy, purely functional programming language. That is, it lacks side effects and imperative progr ...
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Standard ML
Standard ML (SML) is a general-purpose, modular, functional programming language with compile-time type checking and type inference. It is popular among compiler writers and programming language researchers, as well as in the development of theorem provers. Standard ML is a modern dialect of ML, the language used in the Logic for Computable Functions (LCF) theorem-proving project. It is distinctive among widely used languages in that it has a formal specification, given as typing rules and operational semantics in ''The Definition of Standard ML''. Language Standard ML is a functional programming language with some impure features. Programs written in Standard ML consist of expressions as opposed to statements or commands, although some expressions of type unit are only evaluated for their side-effects. Functions Like all functional languages, a key feature of Standard ML is the function, which is used for abstraction. The factorial function can be expressed as follows: ...
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Hope Programming Language
Hope is a small functional programming language In computer science, functional programming is a programming paradigm where programs are constructed by applying and composing functions. It is a declarative programming paradigm in which function definitions are trees of expressions that m ... developed in the 1970s at the University of Edinburgh.Rod Burstall, Burstall R.M, MacQueen D.B, Sannella D.T. (1980) ''Hope: An Experimental Applicative Language''. Conference Record of the 1980 LISP Conference, Stanford University, pp. 136-143. It predates Miranda (programming language), Miranda and Haskell (programming language), Haskell and is contemporaneous with ML (programming language), ML, also developed at the University. Hope was derived from NPL (programming language), NPL, a simple functional language developed by Rod Burstall and John Darlington in their work on program transformation. NPL and Hope are notable for being the first languages with call-by-pattern evaluation and ...
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David MacQueen
David (; , "beloved one") (traditional spelling), , ''Dāwūd''; grc-koi, Δαυΐδ, Dauíd; la, Davidus, David; gez , ዳዊት, ''Dawit''; xcl, Դաւիթ, ''Dawitʿ''; cu, Давíдъ, ''Davidŭ''; possibly meaning "beloved one". was, according to the Hebrew Bible, the third king of the United Kingdom of Israel. In the Books of Samuel, he is described as a young shepherd and harpist who gains fame by slaying Goliath, a champion of the Philistines, in southern Canaan. David becomes a favourite of Saul, the first king of Israel; he also forges a notably close friendship with Jonathan, a son of Saul. However, under the paranoia that David is seeking to usurp the throne, Saul attempts to kill David, forcing the latter to go into hiding and effectively operate as a fugitive for several years. After Saul and Jonathan are both killed in battle against the Philistines, a 30-year-old David is anointed king over all of Israel and Judah. Following his rise to power, David c ...
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Program Transformation
A program transformation is any operation that takes a computer program and generates another program. In many cases the transformed program is required to be semantically equivalent to the original, relative to a particular formal semantics and in fewer cases the transformations result in programs that semantically differ from the original in predictable ways. While the transformations can be performed manually, it is often more practical to use a program transformation system that applies specifications of the required transformations. Program transformations may be specified as automated procedures that modify compiler data structures (e.g. abstract syntax trees) representing the program text, or may be specified more conveniently using patterns or templates representing parameterized source code fragments. A practical requirement for source code transformation systems is that they be able to effectively process programs written in a programming language. This usually require ...
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NPL Programming Language
NPL is a functional programming language with pattern matching designed by Rod Burstall and John Darlington in 1977. The language allows certain sets and logic constructs to appear on the right hand side of definitions, e.g. setofeven(X) <= <:x: x in X & even(x) :> The NPL interpreter evaluates the list of generators from left to right so conditions can mention any bound variables that occur to their left. These were known as set comprehensions. NPL eventually evolved into but lost set comprehensions, which made a reappearance in the form of

POP-2
POP-2 (also referred to as POP2) is a programming language developed around 1970 from the earlier language POP-1 (developed by Robin Popplestone in 1968, originally named COWSEL) by Robin Popplestone and Rod Burstall at the University of Edinburgh. It drew roots from many sources: the languages LISP and ALGOL 60, and theoretical ideas from Peter J. Landin. It used an incremental compiler, which gave it some of the flexibility of an interpreted language, including allowing new function definitions at run time and modification of function definitions while a program was running (both of which are features of dynamic compilation), without the overhead of an interpreted language. Description Stack POP-2's syntax was Algol-like, except that assignments were the other way round: instead of writing a := 3; one wrote 3 -> a; The reason for this was that the language had explicit notion of an '' operand stack''; thus, the previous assignment could be written as two separate ...
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Robin Popplestone
Robin John Popplestone (9 December 1938 in Bristol – 14 April 2004 in Glasgow) was a pioneer in the fields of machine intelligence and robotics. He is known for developing the COWSEL and POP-2, POP programming languages, and for his work on Freddy II with Pat Ambler at the University of Edinburgh Artificial Intelligence laboratory. Biography Robin Popplestone was born in Bristol in 1938, but after WWII his family moved to Belfast.Robin Popplestone obituary
The Scotsman, 22 April 2004
He received an honours degree in mathematics from Queen's University Belfast in 1960. He started a PhD at Manchester University before moving to Leeds University. His project was to develop a program for automated theorem proving, but he got caught up in using the university computer to design a ...
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