- D.W. Barron
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David W. Barron Born 1935 Residence UK Citizenship UK Nationality British Fields Physics
Computer ScienceInstitutions University of Cambridge Mathematical Laboratory
University of Southampton
British Computer SocietyKnown for Ionospheric Studies
Programming Language Design and ImplementationDavid William Barron [FBCS] (c. 1935-) is a British academic in Physics and Computer Science.
Contents
Life
He is married to Valerie, and has two children, Nik and Jacky.
Work
Radio Wave Propagation
Barron's work with H. Risbeth on radio wave propagation[1][2] was pioneering in furthering the understanding of how radio waves were reflected at the ionospheric boundary.
Computer Science
David Barron began his academic career in Cambridge University where he took a PhD in the Cavendish Laboratory. His research involved very early work in computer applications and he was a user of the original EDSAC computer, the world's first stored-program electronic computer to go into general service.
After his PhD he joined the Cambridge Mathematical Laboratory and contributed to the development of the EDSAC 2 computer. In the early 1960s, he was leader of software development in the Titan project, a joint effort with Ferranti Ltd to develop a reduced version of the Atlas computer. In this role he led the Cambridge efforts to develop the Titan Supervisor (a multi-programming operating system) and CPL (Combined Programming Language). The Titan Supervisor led in due course to the Cambridge Multiple-Access System which provided a pioneering time-sharing service to a large user community in Cambridge and was also later employed in the Cambridge based Computer Aided Design Centre. The CPL project broke new ground in language design and application generality, and the resulting defining paper was written by the original development team.[3] CPL was notable for leading to BCPL and hence B and then C programming language.
Barron left Cambridge in 1967 to take up a chair of Computer Science at the University of Southampton where he remained until his retirement in 2000. As a Computer Scientist, he contributed to many fields as Computer Science developed into a discipline of its own. At Southampton he continued his almost unique abilities in writing and lecturing. In 2009, on the 60th anniversary of the completion of the Cambridge EDSAC computer, he delivered a seminal lecture on what was involved in programming this pioneering machine in the 1950s.[4]
He was one of the founding editors of Software - Practice and Experience|, and served as the editor from 1971 for over 30 years.
Barron is the author of many texts that explained the emerging subject to generations of students and researchers. With others he published, in 1967, the manual for Titan Autocode programming.[5] In subsequent years Barron wrote texts on Recursive Programming[6] (1968), Assemblers and Loaders[7] (1969), Operating Systems[8][9] (1971 and 1984), Programming Languages[10] (1977), Pascal Implementation[11] (1981), Text Processing and Typesetting[12] (1987) and Scripting Languages[13] (2000).
On his all too brief personal web page (http://users.ecs.soton.ac.uk/dwb/) Barron modestly describes himself as "old-fashioned scholar, relic of the past".
References
- ^ H. Rishbeth and D.W. Barron, 1960, Equilibrium electron distributions in the ionospheric F2 layer, J. Atmos. Terr. Phys. 18, 234.
- ^ D.W. Barron, 1959, The 'Waveguide mode' theory of radio wave propagation when the ionosphere is not sharply bounded, DOI: 10.1080/14786435908238287
- ^ D.W. Barron, J.N. Buxton, D.F. Hartley, E. Nixon, and C. Strachey. "The main features of CPL", The Computer Journal 6:2:134-143 (1963).full text (subscription)
- ^ D.W. Barron "EDSAC: A Programmer Remembers", The Computer Journal in publication (2010).
- ^ D.W. Barron et al., Titan Autocode programming manual, Cambridge, University Mathematical Laboratory, 1967
- ^ D.W. Barron, 1968, Recursive techniques in programming, Macdonald & Co.
- ^ D.W. Barron, 1969, Assemblers and loaders, Elsevier North-Holland
- ^ D.W. Barron, 1971, Computer operating systems, Chapman and Hall
- ^ D.W. Barron, 1984, Computer operating systems : for micros, minis, and mainframes, Chapman and Hall
- ^ D.W. Barron, 1977, An introduction to the study of programming languages, Cambridge University Press
- ^ D.W. Barron, 1981, PASCAL : the language and its implementation, Wiley
- ^ D.W. Barron and M Rees, 1987, Text processing and typesetting with Unix, Addison-Wesley
- ^ D.W. Barron, 2000, The world of scripting languages, Wiley
Categories:- English computer scientists
- Fellows of the British Computer Society
- Academics of the University of Southampton
- Living people
- 1935 births
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