This Day in History

January 11, 1934

C.A.R. Hoare, the Developer of the Axiomatic Approach, is Born

Charles Antony Richard (Tony) Hoare is born. He received an MA from University of Oxford in 1959. During 1960 - 1968 he had worked at Elliot Bros. (London) Ltd. During 1968 - 1977 Hoare taught at the University of Belfast. Since 1977 he has become James Martin Professor of Computing at Oxford. He was a major contributor to the understanding of the logic of programs, and in particular was the developer of the Axiomatic Approach to program description. He received the 1980 ACM Turing Award and the 1990 Computer Society Pioneer Award.

January 11, 1960

ACM/GAMM Committee Convenes to Develop Algol

ACM/GAMM committee, a team of computer industry luminaries, convenes to develop Algol 60, the first block-structured language and one that eventually led to the more widely used Pascal. Algol (Algorithmic Language) and Algol 60 were designed to solve scientific computations and were meant to be more portable than most languages in existence at the time. Alan Perlis described Algol as the lingua franca of computer science.