Re: RIP Robert Dewar 1945-2015

[Paul Rubin <no.email@nospam.invalid>]

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.