Robert Berriedale Keith Dewar (born June 21, 1945, Oxford, UK) is an American computer scientist.
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Dewar obtained his B.S. from the University of Chicago in 1964, and his Ph.D., also from the University of Chicago, in 1968.
Dewar was first Assistant Professor of Information Science and later Associate Professor of Computer Science at the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) from 1968 to 1974, before becoming Research Associate Professor of Computer Science at New York University (NYU) in 1975, where he was Full Professor of Computer Science from 1976 to 2005.
He was Chairman of IFIP Working Group 2.1 from 1978 to 1983 and Associate Director of the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences from 1994 to 1997. Currently he is President and CEO of AdaCore, which he co-founded in 1994.[1]
While at the IIT, Dewar created the original SPITBOL compiler together with Ken Belcher in 1971, and Macro SPITBOL with Tony McCann in 1974.[2] These implementations of SNOBOL4, which quickly gained widespread popularity, are still being used today.
In the 70's he was a principle author of the Realia COBOL compiler, widely used in commercial environments to this day (marketed by Computer Associates).
Dewar became involved with the Ada programming language from its early days as a Distinguished Reviewer of the Ada 1983 design proposed by Jean Ichbiah that was selected by the US DoD.
He was co-director (with Ed Schonberg) of the team at NYU that produced Ada/Ed, an interpreter for Ada 83 written in SETL[3][4] and the first Ada implementation to pass the strenuous ACVC validation suite,[5] mandated for being allowed to use the trademarked name Ada.
Dewar and Schonberg went on to produce GNAT, a free-software compiler for Ada that forms part of the GNU Compiler Collection.
Dewar also participated in the SETL project at NYU, and co-authored the handbook Programming With Sets: An Introduction to SETL. He also influenced the design of the ABC programming language, in particular its SETL-style high-level data types, such as associative arrays.
According to a recent blog entry by Guido van Rossum, the author of Python, the use of the colon in Python is due to Robert's wife.[1]
Robert Dewar is one of two sons of the theoretical chemist Michael J. S. Dewar and Mary Dewar, née Williamson, a historian and scholar of English Tudor history.[2] [3] In 1959 he moved with his parents from England to Chicago, Illinois, USA. He is married to Karin Dewar, née Anderson, and has two children, Jennifer (b. 1965) and Keith (b. 1969).
Dewar has been involved with the Village Light Opera Group (VLOG) for 35 years in many capacities, from producer to president, from fly master to music director, and on stage from Harem Guard to The Mikado.[4] The Dewar Center for the Performing Arts of the VLOG is named in recognition of Robert and Karin Dewar's contributions.[5]