Forgotten Hints on Programming Language Design

Niklaus Wirth
ETH Zurich, Switzerland

Monday, March 2, 1998
11:00 AM
McDonnell Douglas Engineering Auditorium, UCI

Programming language design is the art of finding a compromise between many, often conflicting criteria. Among them are simplicity and economy of concept, efficient implementability, structure and regularity, machine independence, formality of definition, conventionality of appearance, appeal to feelings, compatibility with current standards, and support of established organizations. We offer an opinion on their relative relevance and merit in education and practice. We also present a critical evaluation of some of these criteria on hand of our recent language design for applications in embedded systems for sensing and control.

• ACM, A. M. Turing Award (1984)
• IEEE Computer Society, Computer Pioneer Award (1988)
• IBM Europe Science and Technology Prize 1988 (1989)
• Member, Swiss Academy of Engineering, 1992
• Foreign Associate, US Academy of Engineering, 1994
• Orden Pour le merite, 1996

• University of York, England, 1978
• Ecole Polytechnique Federale, Lausanne, Switzerland, 1978
• Laval University, Quebec, Canada, 1987
• Johannes Kepler Universitaet Linz, Austria, 1993
• University of Novosibirsk, Russia, 1996
• The Open University, England, 1997

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Information and Computer Science
University of California, Irvine
Irvine, CA 92697-3425

02/04/98