| Rod Burstall | |
|---|---|
| Born | November 1934 Liverpool |
| Residence | Scotland, France |
| Nationality | British |
| Fields | computer scientist |
| Institutions | University of Edinburgh |
| Doctoral students | Thorsten Altenkirch (1993) John Darlington Masahito Hasegawa (1997) Zhaohui Luo J Strother Moore (1973) Gordon Plotkin (1973) Don Sannella |
Rodney Martineau Burstall is one of four founders of the Edinburgh Laboratory for Foundations of Computer Science.
He was an early and influential proponent of functional programming, pattern matching, and list comprehension, and is known for his work with Robin Popplestone on POP, an innovative programming language developed at Edinburgh around 1970, and later work with John Darlington on NPL and David MacQueen and Don Sannella on Hope, a precursor to Standard ML, Miranda, and Haskell. In 2009 he was awarded the ACM SIGPLAN Programming Language Achievement Award.
Rod retired in 2000, becoming Professor Emeritus, and now spends most of his time in Scotland and France.