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11 - From Centaur to the Meta-Environment: a tribute to a great meta-technologist

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 August 2010

By
Paul Klint
Edited by
Yves Bertot ,
Gérard Huet ,
Jean-Jacques Lévy  and
Gordon Plotkin
Paul Klint
Affiliation:
Centrum voor Wiskunde en Informatica and University of Amsterdam
Yves Bertot
Affiliation:
INRIA-Sophia Antipolis, France
Gérard Huet
Affiliation:
Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique (INRIA), Rocquencourt
Jean-Jacques Lévy
Affiliation:
Institut National de Recherche en Informatique et en Automatique (INRIA), Rocquencourt
Gordon Plotkin
Affiliation:
University of Edinburgh
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Summary

Abstract

Gilles Kahn was a great colleague and good friend who has left us much too early. In this paper I will sketch our joint research projects, the many discussions we had, some personal recollections, and the influence these have had on the current state-of-the-art in meta-level language technology.

Getting acquainted

Bâtiment 8.On a sunny day in the beginning of July 1983 I parked my beige Citroen Dyane on the parking lot in front of Bâtiment 8, INRIA Rocquencourt. At the time, the buildings made the impression that the US military who had constructed the premises in Rocquencourt were also the last that had ever used the paint brush. Inside, lived an energetic research family and I was hosted by project CROAP headed by Gilles Kahn. My roommates Veronique Donzeau-Gouge and Bertrand Mélèse helped me find a bureau in a corner in the cramped building and helped to set up a Multics account on the Honeywell-Bull mainframe.

After some flirtations with computer graphics, software portability and the Unix operating system, I turned to the study of string processing languages on which I wrote a PhD in 1982. The main topic was the Summer programming language that featured objects, success/failure driven control flow, string matching and composition, and a “try” mechanism that allowed the execution of an arbitrary sequence of statements and would undo all side effects in case this execution resulted in failure.

Type
Chapter
Information
From Semantics to Computer Science
Essays in Honour of Gilles Kahn
 , pp. 235 - 264
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 2009

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