Christopher Strachey

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Christopher Strachey, (November 16, 1916 – May 18, 1975) 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.

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.

=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.

=Love Letters= =Selected Publications=
 * 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=
 * 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
 * Lytton Strachey from Wikipedia (uncle of Christopher Strachey)


 * Christopher Strachey’s Nineteen-Fifties Love Machine by Siobhan Roberts, The New Yorker, February 14, 2017

=References= Up one level