Name Cornelis A. | Died March 21, 2013 | |
Books Top-down Programming with Elan | ||
Cornelis Hermanus Antonius "Kees" Koster (born 13 July 1943 - 21 March 2013) was a Dutch computer scientist who was a professor in the Department of Informatics at the Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands.
Born in Haarlem, his family moved to Jakarta after the war. At the age of 11 he returned to the Netherlands on his own. After his study at the University of Amsterdam he worked at the Mathematisch Centrum (MC) in Amsterdam under Adriaan van Wijngaarden.
There he was one of the editors of the original Report on the Algorithmic Language ALGOL 68, being responsible for the design of ALGOL 68's transput, and was the creator of the original Compiler Description Language (CDL). He is also the creator of Affix grammars, which are a variant of Van Wijngaarden grammars. In a sense, CDL is a deterministic executable affix grammar, while Prolog is a non-deterministic executable affix grammar (a link acknowledged by the implementors of the original Prolog interpreter).
In 1972 he moved to Berlin to initiate an informatics course at the Technical University of Berlin. In 1977 he became the first Professor of Informatics at the Radboud University Nijmegen. He died in a motor cycle accident in 2013.