Niklaus Wirth, Professor, retired

Address:
Departement Informatik
ETH
CH-8092 Zürich
(Switzerland)



Niklaus Wirth was born in February 1934 in Winterthur, Switzerland. He received the degree of Electronics Engineering from the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich in 1959, an M.Sc. from Laval University, Canada, in 1960, and a Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley in 1963. He was Assistant Professor of Computer Science at Stanford University (1963 - 1967), and then at the University of Zurich. In 1968 he became Professor of Informatics at ETH Zurich. He spent two sabbatical years at the Xerox PARC in California, and he is retired since April 1999.

Recent articles

·         Oberon, 2006-2008

·         Miscellaneous topics

Former projects

·         Projects 1968 - 1999

Selected honours

·         ACM, A. M. Turing Award (1984)

·         IEEE Computer Society, Computer Pioneer Award (1988)

·         IBM Europe Science and Technology Prize 1988 (1989)

·         Member, Swiss Academy of Engineering, 1992

·         Foreign Associate, US Academy of Engieering, 1994

·         Orden Pour le merite, 1996

·         1999 ACM SIGSOFT, Outstanding Research Award in Software Engineering

·         Leonardo da Vinci Medal. Societe Europeenne pour la Formation des Ingenieurs (SEFI), Sept 1999

·         Eduard-Rhein Technology-Prize, München, Oct. 2002

·         Honorary Doctorates:

o        University of York, England, 1978

o        Ecole Polytechnique Federale, Lausanne, Switzerland, 1978

o        Laval University, Quebec, Canada, 1987

o        Johannes Kepler Universitaet Linz, Austria, 1993

o        University of Novosibirsk, Russia, 1996

o        The Open University, England, 1997

o        University of Pretoria, South Africa, 1998

o        Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic, 1999

o        Saint Petersburg State University of Information Technologies, Mechanics and Optics, Russia, 2005

o        State University of Ekaterinburg, Russia, 2005

Books

·         Systematic Programming. Prentice Hall, Englewood Cliffs, 1973.

·         PASCAL - User Manual and Report. (with Kathy Jensen) Springer-Verlag, 1974.

·         Algorithms + Data Structures = Programs. Prentice-Hall, Inc., Englewood Cliffs (Nov. 1975).

·         Programming in Modula-2. Springer-Verlag, Heidelberg, New York, 1982.

·         Algorithms & Data Structures. Prentice-Hall, 1986.

·         Programming in Oberon: Steps beyond Pascal and Modula. (with M. Reiser) Addison-Wesley, 1992. [PDF (334 KB)]

·         Project Oberon. (with J. Gutknecht) Addison-Wesley, Reading, 1992. [PDF (4’398 KB)]

·         Digital Circuit Design. Springer-Verlag, Heidelberg, 1995.

·         Theory and Techniques of Compiler Construction. Addison-Wesley, Reading, April 1996.

·         The School of Niklaus Wirth. L. Boszormenyi, J. Gutknecht, G. Pomberger, Eds.
D-Punkt Verlag, 2000. ISBN 3-932588-85-1, and Morgan Kaufmann Pub. ISBN 1-55860-723-4

·         Systematisches Programmieren. Teubner Studienbuecher, 1972, Teubner-Verlag, Stuttgart.

·         Algorithmen und Datenstrukturen. Teubner-Verlag, Stuttgart, 1975.

·         Compilerbau. Teubner-Verlag, Stuttgart, 1977.

·         Compiler Construction [PDF (597 KB)]

·         Programming in Modula-2. Springer Verlag, 1985.

·         Algorithmen und Datenstrukturen (using Modula-2). Teubner-Verlag, Stuttgart, 1985.

·         Algorithms and Data Structures (1985) (Oberon version: August 2004) [PDF (1’241 KB)]

·         Programmieren in Oberon: Das neue Pascal. Addison-Wesley, Reading, 1994.

·         Grundlagen und Techniken des Compilerbaus. Addison-Wesley, Bonn, 1995.

Selected articles

·         A Contribution to the Development of ALGOL (with C.A.R. Hoare).
Comm. ACM 9, (June 1966) 413-432.

·         The Programming Language Pascal.
Acta Informatica, 1, (Jun 1971) 35-63.
also in Programming Language Design, A.I.Wasserman, Ed., IEEE Computer Society Press, 1980.

·         Program Development by Stepwise Refinement.
Comm. ACM, 14, 4, (Apr 1971) 221-227.
also in Software Design Techniques, P.Freeman, A.I.Wasserman, Eds. IEEE Computer Society Press, 1980.

·         On the Composition of Well-Structured Programs . Comp. Surv. 6, 4 (Dec. 1974), pp. 247 – 259.

·         Modula: A language for modular multiprogramming.

·         The use of Modula.

·         Design and Implementation of Modula.
Software - Practice and Experience, 7, 3-84 (1977).

·         The Personal Computer Lilith.
Microcomputer Systems Design, Lecture Notes in Computer Science Nr. 126, Springer-Verlag (1981).
also in Software Development Environments, A.I.Wasserman, Ed., IEEE Computer Society Press, 1981.
also in Proc. 5th International Conf. on Software Engineering, IEEE Computer Society Press, 1981.

·         From Programming Language Design to Computer Construction. (Turing Award Lecture), Comm. ACM, 28, 2, 159-164 (Feb. 1985)
and in ACM Turing Award Lectures, acm Press / Addison-Wesley, 1987, ISBN 0-201-07794-9

·         The Programming Language Oberon.
Software - Practice and Experience, 18, 7, (July 1988), 671-690.

·         The Oberon System (with J. Gutknecht).
Software - Practice and Experience, 19, 9, (Sept. 1989), 857-893.

·         A Plea for Lean Software, IEEE Computer, 28, 2, (Feb. 1995), 64-68.

·         Tasks versus Threads: An Alternaltive Multiprocessing Paradigm.
Software-Concepts and Tools, 17, (1996), 6-12.

·         Hardware Compilation: Translating Programs into Circuits.
IEEE Computer, 31, 6, (June 98), 25-31.

·         The Development of Procedural Programming Languages.
Personal Contributions and Perspectives.
Springer-Verlag, LNCS 1897 , Proc. JMLC, Zurich, Sept. 2000.

·         Embedded Systems and Real-time Programming in Embedded Software, 1st International Workshop EMSOFT 2001, 
Th. A. Henzinger and Ch. M. Kirsch, Eds., LNCS 2211, pp. 486-492

·         Pascal and its Successors. In Software Pioneers, M. Broy and E. Denert, Eds. Springer-Verlag, 2002

·         Good Ideas – Through the Looking Glass. IEEE Computer, Jan. 2006, pp. 56 – 68.

·         Modula-2 and Oberon. Paper submitted to HOPL-3, June 2005, revised March, May and June 2006.

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