Ralph Griswold

Ralph E. Griswold (19 May 1934, Modesto, CA – 4 October 2006, Tucson, AZ) was a computer scientist known for his research into high-level programming languages and symbolic computation. His language credits include the string processing language SNOBOL [Griswold, Ralph E., Poage, J. F. and Polensky, Ivan P. (1968, 2nd ed. 1971) "The SNOBOL 4 Programming Language" Prentice-Hall, Englewood Cliffs, NJ, ISBN 0-13-815373-6 ;] , SL5 [Griswold, Ralph E. and Hanson, David R. (April 1977) "An overview of SL5" "ACM SIGPLAN Notices" 12(4): pp.40-50;] [ [http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=359502 Griswold, Ralph E. and Hanson, David R. (May 1978) "The SL5 procedure mechanism" "Communications of the ACM" 21(5): pp.392-400] ;] , and Icon [Griswold, Ralph E. and Griswold, Madge T. (1996) "History of the Icon programming language" in Bergin, Thomas J. and Gibson, Richard G. (eds.) "History of Programming Languages II" ACM Press, New York, NY; ] .

He attended Stanford University, receiving a bachelor's degree in physics, then an M.S. and Ph.D. in electrical engineering. Griswold went to Bell Labs in 1962, where he studied ideas for non-numerical computation. SNOBOL was the outcome; although primitive by 21st-century standards, it was a radically different language in its time. He became the head of the Labs' Programming Research and Development department in 1967.

In 1971, he was hired by the University of Arizona to be its first professor of computer science, subsequently organized the department, and was its head until 1981. While at Arizona, Griswold developed Icon. The earlier Ratfor implementation of Icon was discarded and the language rewritten from scratch in C and UNIX. [Shapiro, E. (July 1985) "SNOBOL and Icon: Language Designer Ralph Griswold Looks at His Language" "Byte" 10(7): pp.341-346 ;]

In 1990 Griswold was appointed Regents' Professor, and he retired in 1995. "As one of the founders of the Bell Labs software culture which spawned UNIX, C, and many other essential contributions to modern software, Ralph Griswold brought to his academic research not only brilliance, but also experience and a value system that demanded that research ideas be tested by fire and proven useful and usable by real users, not just good-looking diagrams in academic papers." [ [http://www.cs.nmsu.edu/~jeffery/courses/580/lecture.html Jeffery, Clinton L. (2004) "The Icon Language Family" "CS 580: Compiler Construction Lecture Notes" New Mexico State University, Las Cruces, NM] ;]

After his retirement, his interests turned to the mathematical aspects of weaving. [ [http://www.cs.arizona.edu/news/articles/200610-griswold.html Ralph Griswold 1934-2006, retrospective at University of Arizona] ] [ [http://www.cs.arizona.edu/patterns/weaving/index.html On-Line Digital Archive of Documents on Weaving and Related Topics] ]

Griswold died on October 4 2006, from cancer [ [http://www.interesting-people.org/archives/interesting-people/200610/msg00020.html Wampler, Steve (5 Oct 2006) Interesting-People Message] ]

Griswold's son, Bill Griswold, is also a computer scientist.

References

* Cortada, James W. (1987) "Historical Dictionary of Data Processing: Biographies" Greenwood Press, New York, ISBN 0-313-25651-9 ;

External links

* [http://www.cs.arizona.edu/~ralph/ Ralph Griswold home page at Arizona]
* [http://www.unixreview.com/documents/s=10102/ur0610a/ur0610a.htm Obituary by Peter Salus]
* [http://www.cbi.umn.edu/oh/display.phtml?id=178 Ralph Griswold oral histories] at the [http://www.cbi.umn.edu/ Charles Babbage Institute]
* [http://ralphgriswold.com/ Memorial]