Robert Bruce Findler

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Robert Bruce Findler, colloquially known as "Robby", is a computer scientist, currently teaching at the University of Chicago. He is also a member of PLT and, as such, responsible for the creation and maintenance of DrScheme. In addition to DrScheme, Findler has contributed numerous components to PLT Scheme and supervises its Web-based software library, called PLaneT. Findler is also a leading team member of the TeachScheme! project.

Findler received his PhD at Rice University under the direction of Matthias Felleisen. His dissertation is on the linguistics of software contracts, popularly known as design by contract.

In addition to DrScheme and software contracts, Findler focuses on the design and implementation of a workbench for semantics engineers. This workbench, currently dubbed REDEX, is a tool for specifying and executing the reduction semantics of a programming language. It is already widely used by programming language researchers in the US and Europe. Most recently, SUN's Fortress research team used REDEX to specify and explore key parts of their language.

Currently Findler serves as the semantics editor of the Revised^6 Report on the Scheme programming language. He and his PhD student Jacob Matthews have developed a REDEX model of the core semantics, which is included as an appendix of the report. The appendix plays the same role as ML's formal specification (Milner, Tofte, Harper) but is executable and thus visualize individual examples.