Assigning meanings to programs robert floyd

Hoare, who in , starting from Floyd's work, developed his calculus of pre- and postcondition semantics for computer programs. Early on, Knuth and Floyd had found their academic exchanges so productive that they decided they had to be at the same institution, and both came to Stanford.

The two were in constant communication when Knuth was working on his book The Art of Computer Programming originally intended to be one volume , which was supposed to assemble all the interesting algorithms that computer science had to offer. But Knuth was not able to finish his book. As he was writing, he constantly had to cope with new, elegant algorithms that he needed to accommodate. Floyd, the book's major pre-publication reviewer and the person cited more than anyone else in the book, was the main "culprit.

Floyd may have been the first advocate of refactoring -- the rewriting of working programs from scratch, re-using only the essential ideas. Refactoring is now standard practice among computer programmers.

By continuously looking for simpler ways to do the same thing, Floyd aimed to improve not only programs but also programmers' abilities and understanding. At Stanford, he taught algorithmic courses, including "Sorting and Searching.

Floyd was chair of the Department of Computer Science from to , a period of great departmental growth when Computer Science moved from Forsythe Hall to more centrally located Margaret Jacks Hall.

Floyd was able to use the prestige of his post in conjunction with Amnesty International and an international cadre of systems scientists to help save former Chilean Minister of Education Fernando Flores, who was relegated by the Pinochet government to one of Chile's worst prison camps. See All Featured. Transcript Mark Allen Alert Logic bytemeorg mrallen1 yahoo.

It is unreliable, delivered late, unresponsive to change, inefficient, and expensive. Furthermore, since it is currently labor intensive, the situation will further deteriorate as demand increases and labor costs rise. If this sounds like the famous "software crisis" of a decade or so ago, the fact that we have been in the same state for ten or fifteen years suggests that "software depression" is a more apt term.

In part their disappearance is caused by their members' conversion to the new paradigm. But there are always some men who cling to one or another of the older views, and they are simply read out of the profession, which thereafter ignores their work.

At Stanford, he taught algorithmic courses, including "Sorting and Searching. Floyd was chair of the Department of Computer Science from to , a period of great departmental growth when Computer Science moved from Forsythe Hall to more centrally located Margaret Jacks Hall. Floyd was able to use the prestige of his post in conjunction with Amnesty International and an international cadre of systems scientists to help save former Chilean Minister of Education Fernando Flores, who was relegated by the Pinochet government to one of Chile's worst prison camps.

On the basis of an invitation to study at Stanford, issued by Floyd, Flores was allowed to leave the country with his family; he eventually finished his studies at Berkeley and co-authored a book with Stanford computer science Professor Terry Winograd. In , Floyd won the Association for Computing Machinery ACM Turing Award -- the highest honor in computer science -- "for having a clear influence on methodologies for the creation of efficient and reliable software, and 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 algorithms.

A compiler is software that translates a computer program as a whole into machine code that is saved for subsequent execution at a desired time. He enjoyed backgammon -- pitting his skill against computer opponents at home and human opponents in major tournaments, says friend and colleague Gio Wiederhold, professor emeritus of computer science and electrical engineering.

He also was a passionate hiker and mountain climber who loved the wilderness country in the High Sierra, recalls Christiane Floyd. Floyd is survived by four children -- Susan Barnett of Butte, Mont. A memorial service was held Sept. Robert Floyd in All Rights Reserved.