"Programming languages on the whole are very much more complicated than they used to be: object orientation, inheritance, and other features are still not really being thought through from the point of view of a coherent and scientifically well-based discipline or a theory of correctness. My original postulate, which I have been pursuing as a scientist all my life, is that one uses the criteria of correctness as a means of converging on a decent programming language design—one which doesn’t set traps for its users, and ones in which the different components of the program correspond clearly to different components of its specification, so you can reason compositionally about it. [...] The tools, including the compiler, have to be based on some theory of what it means to write a correct program."
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Computer scientists from the United KingdomTuring Award laureatesFellows of the Royal SocietyUniversity of Oxford facultyUniversity of Oxford alumni
Original Language: English
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Oral history interview by Philip L. Frana, 17 July 2002, Cambridge, England; Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota.
https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/C._A._R._Hoare
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C. A. R. Hoare
Charles Antony Richard Hoare (Tony Hoare or C.A.R. Hoare, 11 January 1934 – 5 March 2026) was a British computer scientist, and winner of the 1980 Turing Award. He is best known for his fundamental contributions to the definition and design of programming languages, and for the development of Quicksort, the world's most widely used sorting algorithm.
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