Robert William "Bob" Harper, Jr. (born ) is a

computer science Computer science is the study of computation, automation, and information. Computer science spans theoretical disciplines (such as algorithms, theory of computation, information theory, and automation) to Applied science, practical discipli ...

professor at

Carnegie Mellon University Carnegie Mellon University (CMU) is a private research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. One of its predecessors was established in 1900 by Andrew Carnegie as the Carnegie Technical Schools; it became the Carnegie Institute of Technology ...

who works in

programming language A programming language is a system of notation for writing computer programs. Most programming languages are text-based formal languages, but they may also be graphical. They are a kind of computer language. The description of a programming ...

research. Prior to his position at Carnegie Mellon, Harper was a research fellow at the

University of Edinburgh The University of Edinburgh ( sco, University o Edinburgh, gd, Oilthigh Dhùn Èideann; abbreviated as ''Edin.'' in post-nominals) is a public research university based in Edinburgh, Scotland. Granted a royal charter by King James VI in 1 ...

Career

Harper made major contributions to the design of the

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 ...

programming language and the LF logical framework. Harper was named an ACM Fellow in 2005 for his contributions to type systems for programming languages. In 2021, he received the ACM SIGPLAN Programming Languages Achievement Award for his "foundational contributions to our understanding of type theory and its use in the design, specification, implementation, and verification of modern programming languages".

Books

* Robin Milner, Mads Tofte, Robert Harper, and

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". w ...

. ''The Definition of Standard ML (Revised)''. MIT Press, 1997. *Robert Harper (editor).
Types in Compilation
'. Springer-Verlag Lecture Notes in Computer Science, volume 2071, 2001. *Robert Harper.
Type Systems for Programming Languages
'. Draft, 2000. *Robert Harper.
Programming in Standard ML
'. Working Draft, 2013. *Robert Harper. ''Practical Foundations for Programming Languages''
2007 draft
2nd edition: , 2016.

Personal life

In 2003–2008, Harper hosted the progressive talk sho
''Left Out''
on WRCT-FM with fellow host and

School of Computer Science faculty member Danny Sleator.

References

Bibliography

Robert Harper's Homepage

Existential Type
Robert Harper's blog Programming language researchers Carnegie Mellon University faculty Living people Fellows of the Association for Computing Machinery Year of birth missing (living people) Place of birth missing (living people) {{compu-scientist-stub