Nationality British Name Rod Burstall | Role Computer scientist Fields Computer Science | |
Institutions University of Edinburgh Doctoral advisor N. A. Dudley
K. Brian Haley Doctoral students Thorsten Altenkirch (1993)
Raymond Aubin (1976)
John Darlington (1972)
Martin Feather (1979)
Healfdene Goguen (1994)
Mike Gordon (1973)
Masahito Hasegawa (1997)
Thomas Kleymann (1998)
Zhaohui Luo (1990)
Conor McBride (1999)
James McKinna (1992)
J Strother Moore (1973)
Alan Mycroft (1982)
Gordon Plotkin (1972)
Randy Pollack (1995)
Brian Ritchie (1988)
David Rydeheard (1982)
Don Sannella (1982)
Makoto Takeyama (1995)
Rodney Topor (1975) Books Computational Category Theory Residence Scotland, United Kingdom, France Similar People Don Sannella, Gordon Plotkin, Donald Michie | ||
Rodney Martineau "Rod" Burstall (born 1934) is a British computer scientist and one of four founders of the Laboratory for Foundations of Computer Science at the University of Edinburgh.
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Biography
Burstall studied physics at the University of Cambridge, then an M.Sc. in operational research at Birmingham University. He worked for three years before returning to Birmingham University to earn a Ph.D. in 1966 with thesis titled Heuristic and Decision Tree Methods on Computers: Some Operational Research Applications under the supervision of N. A. Dudley and K. B. Haley.
Burstall 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.
Burstall retired in 2000, becoming Professor Emeritus, and now spends most of his time in Scotland and France.