Peter J. Landin

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Peter Landin is a British computer scientist. He is responsible for inventing the SECD machine and the ISWIM programming language, defining the Landin off-side rule and for coining the term syntactic sugar. The off-side rule allows bounding scope declaration by use of white spaces as seen in languages such as Haskell and Python. Another phrase originating with Landin is "The next 700 ...", although reputedly this was a typing error and should have been "The next 100 ...".

Landin was most active in the mid-1960s, when he worked with Christopher Strachey. He is now a professor at Queen Mary, University of London.

[edit] References

• Landin, Peter J. (March 1966). "The next 700 programming languages". Communications of the ACM 9 (3): 157–166. DOI:10.1145/365230.365257. 

[edit] External links

• Landin's website
• Peter Landin bibliography in the DBLP database
• Program Verification and Semantics: The Early Work meeting, 2001