Christopher Strachey

Christopher Strachey (1916-1975) was an early pioneer of computer science. See http://vmoc.museophile.com/pioneers/strachey.html for a page dedicated to him by the VirtualMuseumOfComputing?.

One of the founders of the field of DenotationalSemantics (with DanaScott). Author of the paper "FundamentalConceptsInProgrammingLanguages".

Amongst other things he was one of the moving forces behind CPL, one time called the Cambridge Programming Language, renamed to Combined Programming Language but known to many as Christopher's Programming Language. CPL begat BCPL ("Basic CPL") and BCPL begat B and B begat C and C begat C++ (CeePlusPlus). So the "C" in "C++" stands for "Christopher", but we shouldn't think any the worse of him for that.

His last name is quite often misspelled as Stratchey.

He invented ParametricPolymorphism as well.

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