William D. Clinger is an

associate professor Associate professor is an academic title with two principal meanings: in the North American system and that of the ''Commonwealth system''. In the ''North American system'', used in the United States and many other countries, it is a position ...

in the Khoury College of Computer Sciences at

Northeastern University Northeastern University (NU or NEU) is a private university, private research university with its main campus in Boston, Massachusetts, United States. It was founded by the Boston Young Men's Christian Association in 1898 as an all-male instit ...

. He is known for his work on higher-order and

functional programming In computer science, functional programming is a programming paradigm where programs are constructed by Function application, applying and Function composition (computer science), composing Function (computer science), functions. It is a declarat ...

languages, and for extensive contributions in helping create and implement international

technical standard A technical standard is an established Social norm, norm or requirement for a repeatable technical task which is applied to a common and repeated use of rules, conditions, guidelines or characteristics for products or related processes and producti ...

s for the programming language Scheme via the

Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers The Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) is an American 501(c)(3) public charity professional organization for electrical engineering, electronics engineering, and other related disciplines. The IEEE has a corporate office ...

(IEEE) and

American National Standards Institute The American National Standards Institute (ANSI ) is a private nonprofit organization that oversees the development of voluntary consensus standards for products, services, processes, systems, and personnel in the United States. The organiz ...

(ANSI). 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 language

Lisp Lisp (historically LISP, an abbreviation of "list processing") is a family of programming languages with a long history and a distinctive, fully parenthesized Polish notation#Explanation, prefix notation. Originally specified in the late 1950s, ...

. He has been on the faculty at Northeastern University since 1994.

Research

Clinger obtained his PhD from the

Massachusetts Institute of Technology The Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) is a Private university, private research university in Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States. Established in 1861, MIT has played a significant role in the development of many areas of moder ...

(MIT) under the supervision of

Carl Hewitt Carl Eddie Hewitt (; 1944 – 7 December 2022)''Carl Hewitt''
Stanford. 2022. was a ...

. His doctoral research revolved around defining a

denotational semantics In computer science, denotational semantics (initially known as mathematical semantics or Scott–Strachey semantics) is an approach of formalizing the meanings of programming languages by constructing mathematical objects (called ''denotations'' ...

for the

actor model The actor model in computer science is a mathematical model of concurrent computation that treats an ''actor'' as the basic building block of concurrent computation. In response to a message it receives, an actor can: make local decisions, create ...

concurrent computing Concurrent computing is a form of computing in which several computations are executed '' concurrently''—during overlapping time periods—instead of ''sequentially—''with one completing before the next starts. This is a property of a syst ...

, which is the same model of computing 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

compiler In computing, a compiler is a computer program that Translator (computing), translates computer code written in one programming language (the ''source'' language) into another language (the ''target'' language). The name "compiler" is primaril ...

s for two implementations of the language: MacScheme, and Larceny. He also invented efficient algorithms for

hygienic macro In computer science, hygienic macros are macros whose expansion is guaranteed not to cause the accidental capture of identifiers. They are a feature of programming languages such as Scheme, Dylan, Rust, Nim, and Julia. The general problem of ...

expansion, accurate decimal-to-binary conversions, and bounded-latency generational

garbage collection Waste collection is a part of the process of waste management. It is the transfer of solid waste from the point of use and disposal to the point of treatment or landfill. Waste collection also includes the curbside collection of recyclable ...

References

External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Clinger, William Year of birth missing (living people) Living people American computer programmers American computer scientists Northeastern University faculty Massachusetts Institute of Technology alumni