Robert Bruce Findler
Encyclopedia
Robert Bruce Findler, colloquially known as "Robby", is a computer scientist, currently teaching at the Northwestern University
Northwestern University
Northwestern University is a private research university in Evanston and Chicago, Illinois, USA. Northwestern has eleven undergraduate, graduate, and professional schools offering 124 undergraduate degrees and 145 graduate and professional degrees....

. He is also a member of the PLT group and, as such, responsible for the creation and maintenance of DrRacket. In addition to DrRacket, Findler has contributed numerous components to Racket and supervises its Web-based software library, called PLaneT. Findler is also a leading team member of the ProgramByDesign project.

Findler received his PhD at Rice University
Rice University
William Marsh Rice University, commonly referred to as Rice University or Rice, is a private research university located on a heavily wooded campus in Houston, Texas, United States...

 under the direction of Matthias Felleisen
Matthias Felleisen
Matthias Felleisen is a computer science professor and an author of German background.Felleisen is currently a Trustee Professor in the College of Computer and Information Science at Northeastern University in Boston, Massachusetts. In the past he has taught at Rice University after receiving his...

. His dissertation was on the linguistics of software contracts, popularly known as design by contract
Design by contract
Design by contract , also known as programming by contract and design-by-contract programming, is an approach to designing computer software...

. His main contribution to software contracts is a more careful accounting of blame, thereby helping quickly programmers home in on the faulty part of a software system.

In addition to DrRacket and software contracts, Findler focuses on the design and implementation of a workbench for semantics engineers. This workbench, called Redex, is a tool for specifying and executing the reduction semantics of a programming language
Programming language
A programming language is an artificial language designed to communicate instructions to a machine, particularly a computer. Programming languages can be used to create programs that control the behavior of a machine and/or to express algorithms precisely....

. It is already widely used by programming language researchers in the US and Europe. Most recently, SUN's Fortress research team used Redex to specify and explore key parts of their language.

Findler served as the semantics editor of the Revised^6 Report on the Scheme programming language. He and his PhD student Jacob Matthews have developed a Redex model of the core semantics, which is included as an appendix of the report. The appendix plays the same role as Standard ML
Standard ML
Standard ML is a general-purpose, modular, functional programming language with compile-time type checking and type inference. It is popular among compiler writers and programming language researchers, as well as in the development of theorem provers.SML is a modern descendant of the ML...

's formal specification (Milner, Tofte, Harper, MacQueen) but is executable and thus can visualize individual examples.

External links

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