RIP Robert Dewar 1945-2015

[briot.emmanuel@gmail.com]

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.