Christopher Strachey

Christopher Strachey (born in 1916, deceased in 1975) is a data processing specialist Britannique.

It made its studies with the Gresham' S School and the Université of Cambridge.

Strachey is especially known like one of the first to have preached a mathematical approach in the study of the programs. For that, it introduced the idea of dénotationnelle Sémantique (initially called mathematical ) whose objective is to provide methods making it possible to show properties of the programs. It wished by there reaching the same rigor as in the usual mathematical demonstrations, if it is not any more.
One of the main features of dénotationnelle semantics is thus that it is defined by recurrence ( induction in English) on the structure of the programs.

Initially, Strachey initially gave the considerations of syntax to their right place, appealing that the syntactic considerations were not to take the step on semantics in the study of the computer programming languages.

He in particular wrote:

I consider the syntactic problems as primarily nonrelevant for the computer programming languages… Approximately it seems to me correct to think that semantics is there for what we want to say and the syntax for how we have to say it.

Elsewhere, quoted by Dana S. Scott, he writes:

the problems of syntax are much easier than those of semantics. That has like consequence natural, but unhappy, that an great attention was given to the syntactic questions… Nothing could be more far from the truth than than widespread and permanent incomprehension of concepts as fundamental as those of names and values famous with acuity. Indeed, at the time research focused itself rather on the development of the Theory of the languages and its application to the construction of the Compiler S, with undeniable projections which ended in tools of méta-compilation like Lex and Yacc.

It highlighted thus that the two concepts at the base of the tools of translation of the languages (interprets S and Compilateur S) are

on the one hand the syntax (easy) for which one needs powerful tools,
on the other hand the Sémantique (more difficult) than it is necessary to control.

Thanks to him, these two concepts were clearly separated, which was not obvious at the time.

Christopher Strachey thought that the practice of the programming was to never be disconnected from the study of the fundamental and vice concepts and poured. It is thus in the same tread that it developed work on the semantics and the programming of small operating system O6 6 (in 1972) by using a universal computer programming language (for its time) called CPL then BCPL, which took as a starting point Ken Thompson to create B and Dennis Ritchie for the language C.

Visionary, Christopher Strachey posed as of 1959 the stakes and the principles of the Temps divided in an article founder entitled “the time-sharing in the large fast computers”

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