RIP Robert Dewar 1945-2015

RIP Robert Dewar 1945-2015

[briot.emmanuel]

I am very sad to announce that Robert Dewar has passed away yesterday,
in his 70th year.

Robert had been involved with the Ada language for more than 35 years,
participating in the initial design. After working on several compilers in
different companies, he became one of the founders of AdaCore.

He has done too many technical achievements to be able to list them. He
was rightly very proud of the GNAT compiler, and especially, I think, of the
quality of its error messages. He spent a large amount of time improving
every tiny piece of code and forcing all AdaCore developers to adopt
a consistent coding style.

He was also a very significant contributor to comp.lang.ada for a very long
time. I am sure a lot of persons in this group still remember heated discussions
here. I think it is fair to say that Robert was strong minded, but he was also a
fair person quick to acknowledge both sides of any argument.

He used to change sides in the middle of an argument, so we had an ongoing joke
that there were in fact two Roberts.

Sadly, there was only one, and we will miss him.

Emmanuel Briot
for the AdaCore team.

Re: RIP Robert Dewar 1945-2015

[Simon Clubley]

On 2015-07-01, briot.emmanuel@gmail.com <briot.emmanuel@gmail.com> wrote:
> I am very sad to announce that Robert Dewar has passed away yesterday,
> in his 70th year.
>

I am very sorry to hear that. :-(

My condolences to his family and to everyone at AdaCore.

Simon.

-- 
Simon Clubley, clubley@remove_me.eisner.decus.org-Earth.UFP
Microsoft: Bringing you 1980s technology to a 21st century world

Re: RIP Robert Dewar 1945-2015

[Simon Wright]

briot.emmanuel@gmail.com writes:

> I am very sad to announce that Robert Dewar has passed away yesterday,
> in his 70th year.

Deepest sympathy to family, friends and colleagues.

Re: RIP Robert Dewar 1945-2015

[Paul Rubin]

briot.emmanuel@gmail.com writes:
> I am very sad to announce that Robert Dewar has passed away yesterday,
> in his 70th year.

Oh I am sorry to hear that.  I never met him but I exchanged some email
with him a while back, which now feels like a privilege.  Just a few
days ago I was thinking about an old message he once posted on the GCC
mailing list, and I had been considering emailing him to ask why he had
said a particular thing in the message.  Now I guess I won't get to do
that, at least with any hope of getting a reply.

Long before Ada, Bob wrote SPITBOL, an amazing implementation of the old
SNOBOL string-processing language.  It was originally written in IBM 360
assembly language and later rewritten in MINIMAL, a kind of "least
common denominator" portable assembly language, translated to various
machine targets by a SPITBOL program.  It's the most thoroughly
commented code I've ever seen, and it uses a clever garbage collection
trick (supposedly from Lisp 2) that I'm surprised isn't in wider use.
One of the items on my long todo list has been to study the SPITBOL
garbage collector and code something like it in C.

SPITBOL is still alive, maintained by Dave Shields:
https://github.com/spitbol/spitbol

RIP, Bob.

Re: RIP Robert Dewar 1945-2015

[Anh Vo]

On Wednesday, July 1, 2015 at 10:15:46 AM UTC-7, Paul Rubin wrote:
> briot.emmanuel@gmail.com writes:
> > I am very sad to announce that Robert Dewar has passed away yesterday,
> > in his 70th year. 

My deepest condolences to his family and to everyone at AdaCore. I believe he is  watching us from above.

Anh Vo

Re: RIP Robert Dewar 1945-2015

[David Botton]

It is a truly sad loss for me personally and the entire community.

Personally:

I can truly say that I admired him, enjoyed and learned from him in every one of our public and private conversations. He was an important person in my life. Every dealing with him was more than fair. When he asked for something of me I did it with out thinking twice, I knew that I could always trust him. Despite my youth when we first met, despite my lack of formal education in the software world, he judged my code, my writing and my teaching always on their own worth, he treated my words with value when they had value and would call them down when they lacked it as any true man should. I never once felt a sense of prejudgment or prejudice and always considered him a friend.

Community:

He was the heart of GNAT and before retiring from Comp.Lang.Ada its pulse.


In all:

True men are hard to find and when they leave their loss is felt deep and long. Robert Dewar was one.

David Botton

Re: RIP Robert Dewar 1945-2015

[tmoran]

A great loss to his family and also to the computer software community.
My condolences.

Re: RIP Robert Dewar 1945-2015

[Dirk Craeynest]

In article <3cc0594c-b800-4de5-938a-064bef0adf48@googlegroups.com>,
 <briot.emmanuel@gmail.com> wrote:
>I am very sad to announce that Robert Dewar has passed away yesterday,
[...]

[As I wrote on LinkedIn:]

Many of us here in Belgium have enjoyed various talks by Robert over
the past 20 years.  Nothing was too much for him to "spread the Ada
word": he even flew over from New York in 1995 to be the main speaker
at the Ada-Belgium Seminar in Leuven, and has presented at various
of our events since (as well as at numerous Ada-Europe, ACM SIGAda,
and other conferences and events).

Robert was a great man, in all meanings of the word, and will be
remembered for everything he did for the Ada community, among others.
He will be sorely missed...

Dirk Craeynest, Dirk.Craeynest@cs.kuleuven.be
(for Ada-Belgium/Ada-Europe/SIGAda/WG9 mail)

Re: RIP Robert Dewar 1945-2015

[Jerry Petrey]

I want to express my extreme sorrow to all his associates and family.
I would loved to have known him personally but I feel like I have from 
all his contributions to Ada over the years.  This work will live on and 
he will always be a part of it.  RIP Robert.

Jerry

Re: RIP Robert Dewar 1945-2015

[Mark Lorenzen]

This is sad news indeed! I met Robert once in Bath when I worked at Praxis High Integrity Systems.

My condolences to his family, friends and all at AdaCore.

Regards,

Mark

Re: RIP Robert Dewar 1945-2015

[Charles H. Sampson]

I am truly sorry to hear this. He and I were not close friends or
colleagues but I talked with him a number of times and we had some
written exchanges as well. Some thought his personality a bit prickly
but I found it stimulating. The world will be a little poorer without
him in it.

Charlie
-- 
Nobody in this country got rich on his own.  You built a factory--good.
But you moved your goods on roads we all paid for.  You hired workers we
all paid to educate. So keep a big hunk of the money from your factory.
But take a hunk and pay it forward.  Elizabeth Warren (paraphrased)

Re: RIP Robert Dewar 1945-2015

[Patrice Freydiere]

Le mercredi 1 juillet 2015 17:19:24 UTC+2, briot.e...@gmail.com a écrit :
> I am very sad to announce that Robert Dewar has passed away yesterday,
> in his 70th year.
> 
> Robert had been involved with the Ada language for more than 35 years,
> participating in the initial design. After working on several compilers in
> different companies, he became one of the founders of AdaCore.
> 
> He has done too many technical achievements to be able to list them. He
> was rightly very proud of the GNAT compiler, and especially, I think, of the
> quality of its error messages. He spent a large amount of time improving
> every tiny piece of code and forcing all AdaCore developers to adopt
> a consistent coding style.
> 
> He was also a very significant contributor to comp.lang.ada for a very long
> time. I am sure a lot of persons in this group still remember heated discussions
> here. I think it is fair to say that Robert was strong minded, but he was also a
> fair person quick to acknowledge both sides of any argument.
> 
> He used to change sides in the middle of an argument, so we had an ongoing joke
> that there were in fact two Roberts.
> 
> Sadly, there was only one, and we will miss him.
> 
> Emmanuel Briot
> for the AdaCore team.

Very sad, 
best thoughts to his family, 

Patrice

Re: RIP Robert Dewar 1945-2015

[tonyg]

He left a rich legacy for all us Ada dudes.