I will sing praises for the power of “lazy” languages, notably Haskell, to express operations on infinite data structures, and will use power-series algorithms as a prime example.
In this style of programming, subscripts magically evaporate; generating functions actively generate; and the math often looks prettier than it does in calculus books. One doesn’t have to be a conoisseur of Haskell to appreciate the fine taste this new bottle imparts to familiar old wine.

Speaker Details

Doug was the manager of the Bell Labs Unix group that created Unix. In addition to management, Doug was also the individual contributor responsible for pipes, spell, sort, join, graph, speak, tr and more. Although Doug was trained in math (PhD from MIT), his passion is for programming–in many aspects, including programming languages, operating systems, text processing, speech synthesis, cartography, graphics, security, and stream processing. He is a member of the National Academy of Engineering and received the Usenix Association’s lifetime achievement award “for over fifty years of elegant contributions to Unix and programming”. Doug is currently at Dartmouth (http://www.cs.dartmouth.edu/~doug)

Date:

December 3, 2007

Speakers:

Doug McIlroy

Affiliation:

Dartmouth College