Name William Clinger | Role Computer scientist | |
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William D. Clinger is an Associate Professor in the College of Computer and Information Science at Northeastern University. Clinger is known for his work on higher-order and functional programming languages, and in particular for his contributions to the standardization of the Scheme programming language. Clinger was an editor of the second through fifth Revised Reports on Scheme (R2RS – R5RS), and an invited speaker on Scheme at the Lisp50 conference celebrating the 50th birthday of the Lisp programming language. He has been on the faculty at Northeastern University since 1994.
Research
Clinger obtained his PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) under the supervision of Carl Hewitt. His doctoral research revolved around defining a denotational semantics for the Actor model of concurrent computation, which is the same model of computation that originally motivated development of Scheme.
In addition to editing the R2RS – R5RS Scheme standards, Clinger's contributions to Scheme have included the development of compilers for two implementations of the language: MacScheme, and Larceny. He has also invented efficient algorithms for hygienic macro expansion, accurate decimal-to-binary conversions, and bounded-latency generational garbage collection.