Christopher+Strachey

was a British computer scientist and pioneer in computer and programming language design, between 1952 and 1959 ‎technical officer in the [|National Research Development Corporation], between 1962 and 1965 [|fellow] of [|Churchill College, Cambridge], and from 1966 ‎leader of the [|Programming Research Group], [|Oxford University], where he worked with Dana Scott and [|Joe Stoy], constituting the Scott-Strachey approach to [|denotational semantics].
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 * [[image:Stachey.jpg width="208" height="261" link="http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/CCS/res/res43.htm#e"]] ||~  || **Christopher Strachey**, (November 16, 1916 – May 18, 1975)

Strachey had a major role in the development of the [|Elliot 401] and [|Ferranti Pegasus] computers, being responsible for its logical design. In the early 1960s, along with Maurice Wilkes at the [|University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory], he was involved in the development of the [|Titan] or Atlas 2, and developed the [|Combined Programming Language (CPL)]. His influential [|fundamental concepts in programming languages] formalized the distinction between [|L- and R- values]. In 1959, Strachey wrote one of the first seminal papers on [|Time-sharing]. In his 1961 paper //Bitwise operations// he already proposed a parallel prefix bit reversal algorithm. || toc =Checkers= Strachey wrote the first successful AI program, his checkers (draughts) program for the Ferranti Mark 1 at the University of Manchester, after first trials on Turing's [|Pilot ACE] at [|National Physical Laboratory] in 1950/1951 exhausted its memory. By the summer of 1952 the program could play a complete game of checkers at a reasonable speed , and also played “[|God Save the King]” on completion  , and already featured Bitboards for White, Black and Kings to represent the board. His checkers program from 1966 written in [|CPL] is available on-line, in a corrected version with courtesy of Peter Norvig.
 * Christopher Strachey ||~  ||^   ||

=Love Letters=
 * [[image:194px-Loves_Messenger_Stillman_DAM.jpg width="208" link="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Loves_Messenger_Stillman_DAM.jpg"]] ||~  || In 1952, Christopher Strachey used the built-in random number generator of the Ferranti Mark 1 to generate texts that are intended to express and arouse emotions, the Strachey [|love letters] by M.U.C. (Manchester University Computer), recently broached by David Link   . One sample from [|Matt Sephton's] Loveletter Generator, a reimplementation of Strachey 's algorithm from 1952 :

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> >  || =Selected Publications=
 * [|Love's Messenger] ||~  ||^  ||
 * Christopher Strachey (**1952**). //[|Logical or non-mathematical Programs]//. Proceedings of the ACM Conference, Toronto, reprinted in David Levy (ed.) (**1988**). //[|Computer Games I]//.
 * Christopher Strachey (**1959**). //Time sharing in large, fast computers//. [|IFIP Congress 1959]
 * Christopher Strachey (**1961**). //Bitwise operations//. Communications of the ACM, Vol. 4, No. 3
 * Christopher Strachey, Maurice Wilkes (**1961**). //[|Some Proposals for Improving the Efficiency of ALGOL 60]//. Communications of the ACM, Vol. 4, No. 11
 * [|David W. Barron], [|John Buxton], [|David Hartley], [|Eric Nixon], Christopher Strachey (**1963**). //[|The main features of CPL]//. [|The Computer Journal], Vol. 6, No. 2
 * Christopher Strachey (**1965**). //[|An impossible program (Correspondence)]//. [|The Computer Journal], Vol. 7, No. 4
 * Christopher Strachey (**1965**). //A General Purpose Macrogenerator//. [|The Computer Journal], Vol. 8, No. 3
 * Christopher Strachey (**1966**). //Towards a Formal Semantics//. [|North-Holland]
 * Christopher Strachey (**1966**). //[|System Analysis and Programming]//. Scientific American, September 1966, republished August 23, 2011
 * Christopher Strachey (**1967, 2000**). //[|Fundamental Concepts in Programming Languages]//. [|Higher-Order and Symbolic Computation], Vol. 13: 11–49
 * Dana Scott, Christopher Strachey (**1971**). //Toward an Mathematical Semantics for Computer Languages//. [|pdf]
 * [|Robert Milne], Christopher Strachey (**1977**). //Theory of Programming Language Semantics. Part A & B//. [|Chapman & Hall], ISBN-13: 978-0412142604, [|amazon.com], [|oldcomputerbooks.com]

=External Links= > [|Lytton Strachey from Wikipedia] (uncle of Christopher Strachey)
 * [|Christopher Strachey from Wikipedia]
 * [|The Mathematics Genealogy Project - Christopher Strachey]
 * [|Pioneer Profiles - Christopher Strachey] by [|David Barron], [|Resurrection - The Bulletin of the Computer Conservation Society]
 * [|Programming ENTER: Christopher Strachey‘s Draughts Program] by [|David Link]
 * [|Complete Annotated Strachey Checkers Program] by Peter Norvig
 * [|Christopher Strachey Biography] from [|BookRags]
 * [|The Strachey Lectures in Computing Science] at [|Department of Computer Science], [|University of Oxford]
 * [|C. Strachey : Software Engineering Techniques 1969]
 * [|Grand Text Auto » Christopher Strachey: The first digital artist?]
 * [|Strachey family of Sutton Court, Somerset from Wikipedia]
 * [|Christopher Strachey’s Nineteen-Fifties Love Machine] by [|Siobhan Roberts], [|The New Yorker], February 14, 2017

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