The paradigms of programming

Abstract

The 1978 ACM Turing Award was presented to Robert W. Floyd by Walter Carlson, Chairman of the Awards Committee, at the ACM Annual Conference in Washington, D. C., December 4. In making the selection, the General Technical Achievement Award Subcommittee (formerly the Turing Award Subcommittee) cited Professor Floyd for helping to found the following important subfields of computer science: the theory of parsing, the semantics of programming languages, automatic program verification, automatic program synthesis, and analysis of Professor Floyd, who received both his A.B. and B.S. from the University of Chicago in 1953 and 1958, respectively, is a selftaught computer scientist. His study of computing began in 1956, when as a night-operator for an IBM 650, he found the time to learn about programming between loads of card hoppers. Floyd implemented one of the first Algol 60 compilers, finishing his work on this project in 1962. In the process, he did some early work on compiler optimization. Subsequently, in the years before 1965, Floyd systematized the parsing of programming languages. For that he originated the precedence method, the bounded context method, and the production language method of parsing. In 1966 Professor Floyd presented a mathematical method to prove the correctness of programs. He has offered, over the years, a number of fast useful algorithms. These include (1) the tree-sort algorithm for in-place sorting, (2) algorithms for finding the shortest paths through networks, and (3) algorithms for finding medians and convex hulls. In addition, Floyd has determined the limiting speed of digital addition and the limiting speeds for permuting information in a computer memory. His contributions to mechanical theorem-proving and automatic spelling checkers have also been numerous. In recent years Professor Floyd has been working on the design and implementation of a programming language primarily for student use. It will be suitable for teaching structured programming systematically to novices and will be nearly universal in its capabilities.