Douglas McIlroy

Malcolm Douglas McIlroy (born 1932) is a mathematician, engineer, and programmer. As of 2019 he is an Adjunct Professor of Computer Science at Dartmouth College.
McIlroy is best known for having originally proposed Unix pipelines and developed several Unix tools, such as spell, diff, sort, join, graph, speak, and tr. He was also one of the pioneering researchers of macro processors and programming language extensibility. He participated in the design of multiple influential programming languages, particularly PL/I, SNOBOL, ALTRAN, TMG and C++.

His seminal work on software componentization and code reuse makes him a pioneer of component-based software engineering and software product line engineering.

Biography

McIlroy earned his bachelor's degree in engineering physics from Cornell University, and a Ph.D. in applied mathematics from MIT in 1959 for his thesis ''On the Solution of the Differential Equations of Conical Shells'' (advisor Eric Reissner).
He taught at MIT from 1954 to 1958.

McIlroy joined Bell Laboratories in 1958; from 1965 to 1986 was head of its Computing Techniques Research Department (the birthplace of the Unix operating system), and thereafter was Distinguished Member of Technical Staff.

From 1967 to 1968, McIlroy also served as a visiting lecturer at Oxford University.

In 1997, McIlroy retired from Bell Labs, and took a position as an Adjunct Professor in the Dartmouth College Computer Science Department.

He has previously served the Association for Computing Machinery as national lecturer, Turing Award chairman, member of the publications planning committee, and associate editor for the ''Communications of the ACM'', the ''Journal of the ACM'', and '' ACM Transactions on Programming Languages and Systems''. He also served on the executive committee of CSNET.

Research and contributions

Macro processors

McIlroy is considered to be a pioneer of macro processors. In 1959, together with Douglas E. Eastwood of Bell Labs, he introduced conditional and recursive macros into popular SAP assembler, creating what is known as Macro SAP. His 1960 paper was also seminal in the area of extending any (including high-level) programming languages through macro processors. These contributions started the macro-language tradition at Bell Labs ("everything from L6 and AMBIT to C"). McIlroy's macro processing ideas were also the main inspiration for TRAC macro processor.

He also coauthored M6 macro processor in FORTRAN IV, which was used in ALTRAN and later was ported to and included into early versions of Unix.

Contributions to Unix

Throughout the 1960s and 1970s McIlroy contributed programs for Multics (such as RUNOFF A
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McIlroy also took over from Dennis Ritchie compilation of the Unix manual "as a labor of love". Particularly, he edited volume 1 of the manual pages for Version 7 Unix. According to Sandy Fraser: "The fact that there was a manual, that he cIlroyinsisted on a high standard for the manual, meant that he insisted on a high standard for every one of the programs that was documented".

Computer language design

McIlroy influenced the design and implementation of SNOBOL programming language. His string manipulation macros were used extensively in the initial SNOBOL implementation of 1962, and figured prominently in subsequent work, eventually leading to its machine-independent implementation language SIL. The table type ( associative array) was added to SNOBOL4 on McIlroy's insistence in 1969.

In 1960s, he participated in the design of PL/I programming language. He was a member of the IBM– SHARE committee that designed the language and, together with Robert Morris, wrote the Early PL/I (EPL) compiler in TMG for the Multics project.

Around 1965, McIlroy, together with W. Stanley Brown, implemented the original version of ALTRAN programming language for IBM 7094 computers.Hall, A.D., "The ALTRAN System for Rational Function Manipulation — A Survey". ''Communications of the ACM'', 14(8):517–521 (August 1971).

McIlroy has also made a significant influence on design of the programming language C++ (e.g., he proposed the stream output operator <<).

Algorithms

In the 1990s, McIlroy worked on improving sorting techniques, particularly he co-authored an optimized qsort with Jon Bentley.

In 1969, he contributed an efficient algorithm to generate all spanning trees in a graph (first discovered by George J. Minty in 1965).

Awards and recognition

In 1995, he was elected as a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. In 2004, he won both the USENIX Lifetime Achievement Award ("The Flame") and its Software Tools User Group (STUG) award. In 2006, he was elected as a member of the National Academy of Engineering.

Views on computing

McIlroy is attributed the quote "The real hero of programming is the one who writes negative code,"These quotes were heard during a talk he gave to the DLSLUG 12/3/09 where the meaning of ''negative code'' is taken to be similar to the famous Apple developer, Bill Atkinson, team anecdote (i.e., when a change in a program source makes the number of lines of code decrease ('negative' code), while its overall quality, readability or speed improves).

See also

* Darwin (programming game)
* Homoiconicity
* Unix philosophy

Literature

*
*

References

External links

Doug McIlroy's homepage
homepage at Bell Labs website)

Biography

Doug McIlroy Facts


(audio), includes many autobiographical notes, along with discussion of many of the major Unix authors


presentation November 2005
(presentation)(audio)(video)

Original unix spell source code, written by Doug McIlroy

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Dartmouth College faculty
Cornell University College of Engineering alumni
Massachusetts Institute of Technology School of Science alumni
Living people
Members of the United States National Academy of Engineering
Scientists at Bell Labs
Multics people
Unix people
Plan 9 people
1932 births
Date of birth missing (living people)