Robert Berriedale Keith Dewar (21 June 1945 – 30 June 2015) was an American
computer scientist and educator. He helped to develop
programming languages and
compilers and was an outspoken advocate of freely licensed
open-source software. He was a cofounder, CEO, and president of the
AdaCore software company. He was also an enthusiastic amateur performer and musician, especially with the Village Light
Opera Group in
New York City.
Dewar was first Assistant Professor of Information Science and later Associate Professor of Computer Science at the
Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) from 1968 to 1975, before becoming Research Associate Professor of Computer Science at
New York University (NYU) in 1975, where he was Full Professor of Computer Science from 1976 to 2005, and becoming chair of the department.[5][6][7]
He was associate director of the
Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences from 1994 to 1997. Until his death, he was president of
AdaCore, which he cofounded in 1994, and served as its CEO until 2012.[5][10][11] Dewar was an outspoken advocate of freely licensed open-source software and an expert in copyright and patent law for software. He was in demand as a speaker at conferences and expert witness in legal actions.[5][6]
Software contributions
While at the IIT, Dewar created the original
SPITBOL compiler, with Ken Belcher in 1971, and Macro SPITBOL, with Tony McCann in 1974.[12] These implementations of
SNOBOL4, which quickly gained widespread popularity, are still being used today.[13] In the 1980s, he was a principal author of the Realia
COBOL compiler for the IBM PC,[6][14] today marketed by
Computer Associates, and still widely used in commercial environments.[citation needed]
Dewar became involved with the language
Ada from its early days as a Distinguished Reviewer of the Ada 1983 design proposed by
Jean Ichbiah that was selected by the
United States Department of Defense (US DoD).[5] He was codirector, with Edmond Schonberg, of the team at NYU that produced Ada/Ed, an interpreter for Ada 83 written in
SETL[15][16] and the first Ada implementation to pass the strenuous
ACVC validation suite,[17] mandated for being allowed to use the trademarked name Ada.[18]
Dewar and Schonberg went on to produce
GNAT, a
free software compiler for Ada that forms part of the
GNU Compiler Collection (GCC).[5] Dewar also participated in the SETL project at NYU, and co-authored the handbook Programming With Sets: An Introduction to SETL. He influenced the design of the language
ABC, in particular its SETL-style high-level
data types, such as
associative arrays.
Guido van Rossum, the author of the language
Python, wrote that the use of the colon in Python is due to Dewar's wife.[19]
Personal life
He was married to Karin Dewar, née Anderson (died 2013), and had two children,
Jenny (born 1965) and Keith (born 1969), and two grandchildren.[5] Dewar was known as an engaging and witty conversationalist.[6]
Dewar played the
bassoon, recorder, and other musical instruments and enjoyed singing. He was an enthusiastic and valued member and benefactor of the Village Light Opera Group (VLOG) for 35 years, serving them in many capacities, from producer and president to music director, and on stage from Harem Guard to the title role in
Gilbert and Sullivan's The Mikado.[5][6][20] VLOG's Dewar Center for the Performing Arts was named in recognition of Robert and Karin Dewar's contributions.[21] He was also a member of the North American
Heckelphone Society[6] and performed with other groups until only months before his death.[4]
He died of cancer at age 70 at his home in
Bennington, Vermont.[4][22]
Dewar, Robert B. K.; McCann, Anthony P. (1977). "Macro SPITBOL: a SNOBOL4 Compiler". Software: Practice and Experience. 7: 95–113.
doi:
10.1002/spe.4380070106.
S2CID29014301.
Dewar, Robert B. K.;
Golumbic, Martin Charles; Goss, Clinton F. (August 2013) [First published October 1979]. Macro SPITBOL. Computer Science Department Technical Report. Vol. 11. Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences.
arXiv:1308.6096.
Bibcode:
2013arXiv1308.6096D.
Dewar, Robert B. K.; McCann, Anthony P. (1979). MINIMAL: A Machine Independent Assembly Language. Computer Science Department Technical Report. Vol. 12. Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences.
Golumbic, Martin Charles; Dewar, Robert B. K.; Goss, Clinton F. (1980). "Macro Substitutions in Macro SPITBOL – a Combinatorial Analysis". Proceedings of the 11th Southeastern Conference on Combinatorics, Graph Theory and Computing, Congressus Numerantium, Utilitas Math. 29. Winnipeg, Canada: 485–495.
^
abcKravetz, Daniel (September 2015). "Robert Dewar 1945–2015". The Palace Peeper. Vol. LXXX, no. 1. The Gilbert and Sullivan Society of New York. p. 3.
^Emmer, Mark B.; Quillen, Edward K. (2000) [1989].
Macro SPITBOL(PDF). Catspaw. p. 159. Archived from
the original(PDF) on 27 August 2011. Retrieved 20 May 2011.
^Wexelblat, Richard L., ed. (2014). History of Programming Languages. Academic Press. pp. 623–628.
ISBN978-1483266169.
^
ab"Expert Report of Robert B. K. Dewar In Response To The Report Of Kenneth D. Crews". Cambridge University Press et al v. Patton et al, Filing 124, Supplemental Initial Disclosures by Cambridge University Press, Oxford University Press, Inc., Sage Publications, Inc. – Cambridge University Press, Oxfort University Press, Inc., and Sage Publications, Inc. v. Mark P. Becker, Georgia State University President, et al, Civil Action No. 1:08-CV-1425-ODE (Court document). United States District Court For The Northern District Of Georgia, Atlanta Division. p. 18. Exhibit A.
Archived from the original on 1 May 2018. Retrieved 23 April 2019. […]
SPACEMAKER and TERMULATOR, commodity software for IBM PC (
PC DOS file compression utility and
VT-100 emulator), being marketed by Realia, Inc. R.B.K. Dewar (1982-1983), 8088 assembly language, 8,000 lines […]
^Dewar, Robert B. K.; Fisher Jr., Gerald A.; Schonberg, Edmond; Froelich, Robert; Bryant, Stephen F.; Goss, Clinton; Burke, Michael (November 1980). "The NYU Ada translator and interpreter". Proceeding of the ACM-SIGPLAN symposium on Ada programming language - SIGPLAN '80. Vol. 15. pp. 194–201.
doi:
10.1145/948632.948659.
ISBN0-89791-030-3.
S2CID10586359.