Name Lorinda Cherry | ||
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Lorinda Cherry is a computer programmer. She received her Masters in computer science from Stevens Institute of Technology in 1969. She joined Bell Labs in 1972 as an assembly language programmer, and worked there on the Unix operating system for several years. Cherry has prepared a "pocket reference" which is commonly known as the "Purple Card".
Biography
Cherry has worked on mathematical tools, such as bc and dc, and co-authored eqn with Brian Kernighan. Her work on libplot inspired the later GNU plotutils package. She also worked on "analyzing the federalist papers and compressing digital phone books."
Her non-mathematical work included the dictionary for the Unix spell checker and the Bell Labs's Writer's Workbench (wwb). The Writer's Workbench was meant to help students learn to edit their work:
My feeling about a lot of those tools is their value in education is as much pointing out to people who are learning to write that they have choices and make choices when they do it. They don’t think of a writing task as making choices per se. Once they get it on paper they think it’s cast in stone. So it makes them edit.
Cherry also contributed to the Plan 9 operating system, cowrote "Typing Documents on the UNIX System: Using the –ms and –mcs Macros with Troff" with Mike Lesk for the Unix Tenth Edition Manual, and coded up the non-dictionary based spellchecker, typo, conceived by Bob Morris. Lorinda Cherry also worked with Lee McMahon along with Morris collecting substantial corpus of text and studied it statistically. "Some of their tools, particularly uniq and com became staples. From that work came the typo which spots the typing errors statistical interference".
Suggested by Prof. William Vesterman of Rutgers, Cherry worked on pursing and Aho's on fast pattern search. This "turned out to be just the right foundation for an English style-appraiser. That turn was elaborated into Writer's Workbench by Nina MacDonald and others in the Human Performance Engineering Department".
Cherry is one of three co-inventors for AT&T's patent on a "Method and system for verifying the status of 911 emergency telephone services".
Cherry raced rally cars as a hobby. Cherry has always been fascinated by text processing.