David A. Turner is a prominent British computer scientist. Computer science (informally: CS or compsci) is, in its most general sense, the study of computation and information processing, both in hardware and in software. ...

He obtained a Ph.D. from Oxford, passing from being plain Mr Turner to Dr Turner and then to Professor Turner within six months. He has held professorships at Queen Mary College, London, University of Texas at Austin and the University of Kent at Canterbury, where he now retains the post of Emeritus Professor. He is currently (2004) Professor of Computation at Middlesex University, England. The University of Oxford, located in the city of Oxford, England, is the oldest university in the English-speaking world. ... The University of Texas at Austin, often called UT or Texas, is the flagship institution of the University of Texas System. ... The University of Kent (originally titled University of Kent at Canterbury and still often referred to as UKC) is a Glass Plate University in the United Kingdom. ... Middlesex University is a university in North London, England, located in the traditional county of Middlesex (from which it takes its name). ...

He is best known for inventing combinator graph reduction and for designing and implementing three seminal functional programming languages SASL, KRC and Miranda, the last of which was awarded a medal for Technical Achievement by the British Computer Society (BCS Awards, 1990). Combinator graph reduction is a fundamental implementation technique for functional programming languages, in which a program is converted into a combinator representation which is mapped to a directed graph data structure in computer memory, and program execution then consists of rewriting parts of this graph (reducing it) so as to... Functional programming is a programming paradigm that treats computation as the evaluation of mathematical functions. ... SASL (from St. ... KRC (Kent Recursive Calculator) is a lazy functional language developed by David Turner in 1981 based on SASL, with pattern matching and ZF expressions. ... Miranda is a non-strict purely functional programming language developed by Professor David Turner as a successor to his earlier programming languages Sasl and KRC, using some concepts from ML and Hope. ...

Publications

• A new implementation technique for applicative languages, David A. Turner, Software - Practice and Experience, 9:31-49, 1979.

• Functional Programming and its Applications, David A. Turner, Cambridge U Press 1982.

• A Parser Generator for use with Miranda, ACM Symposium on Applied Computing, pp 401-407, Philadelphia, USA, Feb 1996.

• Elementary Strong Functional Programming, D. A. Turner, in R. Plasmeijer, P. Hartel, eds, "First International Symposium on Functional Programming Languages in Education", LNCS 1022, pages 1-13, Springer, 1996.

• Ensuring Streams Flow, Alastair Telford and David Turner, in Johnson, ed., "Algebraic Methodology and Software Technology", 6th International Conference, AMAST '97, Sydney Australia, December 1997, volume 1349 of "Lecture Notes in Computer Science", pages 509-523. AMAST, Springer-Verlag, December 1997.

• Ensuring the Productivity of Infinite Structures, A.J.Telford, D.A.Turner, "Technical Report TR 14-97", 37 pages, Computing Laboratory, University of Kent, March 1998. Under submission to "Journal of Functional Programming".

• Ensuring Termination in ESFP, A. J. Telford and D. A. Turner, in "15th British Colloquium in Theoretical Computer Science", page 14, Keele, April 1999. To appear in "Journal of Universal Computer Science".

• A Hierarchy of Elementary Languages with Strong Normalisation Properties, A.J.Telford, D.A.Turner, "Technical Report TR 2-00", 66 pages, University of Kent Computing Laboratory, January 2000.

• Total Functional Programming, Keynote address, pp 1-15, SBLP 2004, Rio de Janeiro, May 2004.

External links

• Staff page at the University of Kent at Canterbury
• Staff page at Middlesex University