Alexander Stepanov

Alexander Stepanov

Alexander Alexandrovich Stepanov (Russian: Алекса́ндр Алекса́ндрович Степа́нов), born November 16, 1950 in Moscow, is a Russian computer programmer, best known as an advocate of generic programming and as the primary designer and implementer of the C++ Standard Template Library,[1] which he started to develop around 1992 while employed at HP Labs. He had earlier been working for Bell Labs close to Andrew Koenig and tried to convince Bjarne Stroustrup to introduce something like Ada generics in C++.[2] He is credited with the notion of concept.[3][4]

He is the author (with Paul McJones) of Elements of Programming,[5] a book that grew out of a "Foundations of Programming" course[6] that Stepanov taught at Adobe Systems (while employed there). He is also the author (with Daniel E. Rose) of From Mathematics to Generic Programming.[7]

He retired in January 2016 from A9.com.[8]

Standard Template Library and generic programming

Alexander Stepanov is an advocate of what is known as generic programming. Although David Musser had developed and advocated some aspects of generic programming already by 1971, it was limited to a rather specialized area of software development (computer algebra).

Stepanov recognized the full potential for generic programming and persuaded his then-colleagues at General Electric Research and Development (including, primarily, David Musser and Deepak Kapur) that generic programming should be pursued as a comprehensive basis for software development. At the time there was no real support in any programming language for generic programming.

The first major language to provide such support was Ada, with its generic units feature. By 1987 Stepanov and Musser had developed and published an Ada library for list processing that embodied the results of much of their research on generic programming. However, Ada had not achieved much acceptance outside the defense industry and C++ seemed more likely to become widely used and provide good support for generic programming even though the language was relatively immature. Another reason for turning to C++, which Stepanov recognized early on, was the C/C++ model of computation which allows very flexible access to storage via pointers is crucial to achieving generality without losing efficiency. It eventually led to the development of the Standard Template Library of C++.

See also

References

  1. ↑ Stepanov, Alexander; Lee, Meng (1995-11-14). "The Standard Template Library". HP Laboratories Technical Report 95-11(R.1).
  2. ↑ Stroustrup, Bjarne (May 2007). "Evolving a language in and for the real world: C++ 1991-2006, section 4.1.2" (PDF). preprint. ACM HOPL-III Conference: 4–1–4–59. ISBN 978-1-59593-766-7. doi:10.1145/1238844.1238848.
  3. ↑ a bit of background for concepts and C++17—Bjarne Stroustrup, by Bjarne Stroustrup | Feb 26, 2016
  4. ↑ Alex Stepanov, by Bjarne Stroustrup | Jan 21, 2016
  5. ↑ Stepanov, Alexander; McJones, Paul (2009). Elements of Programming. Addison-Wesley. ISBN 978-0-321-63537-2.
  6. ↑ Stepanov, Alexander (2007). Notes on Programming (PDF).
  7. ↑ Stepanov, Alexander A.; Rose, Daniel E. (2015). From Mathematics to Generic Programming. Addison-Wesley. ISBN 978-0321942043.
  8. ↑ Alex Retirement, Jan 14, 2016

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