Robert Dewar

Robert Berriedale Keith Dewar (21 June 1945 – 30 June 2015) was an American computer scientist and educator. He helped to develop programming languages and compilers and was an outspoken advocate of freely licensed open-source software. He was a cofounder, CEO, and president of the AdaCore software company. He was also an enthusiastic amateur performer and musician, especially with the Village Light Opera Group in New York City.

Early life and education Dewar was born in Oxford, England, one of two sons of the theoretical chemist Michael J. S. Dewar and Mary Dewar, née Williamson (d. 1994), a historian and scholar of English Tudor history. In 1959, he moved with his parents from England to Chicago, Illinois, when his father accepted a teaching job at the University of Chicago. Dewar attended the University of Chicago, earning a Bachelor of Science (B.S.) in 1964, and a Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) in chemistry in 1968. He began to work with computers during graduate school.

Career Dewar was first Assistant Professor of Information Science and later Associate Professor of Computer Science at the Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) from 1968 to 1975, before becoming Research Associate Professor of Computer Science at New York University (NYU) in 1975, where he was Full Professor of Computer Science from 1976 to 2005, and becoming chair of the department.

He was involved with developing international standards in programming and informatics, as a member of the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP) IFIP Working Group 2.1 (WG 2.1) on Algorithmic Languages and Calculi, which specified, maintains, and supports the languages ALGOL 60 and ALGOL 68. He was involved in the design of ALGOL 68, Dewar was an outspoken advocate of freely licensed open-source software and an expert in copyright and patent law for software. He was in demand as a speaker at conferences and expert witness in legal actions. These implementations of SNOBOL4, which quickly gained widespread popularity, are still being used today. In the 1980s, he was a principal author of the Realia COBOL compiler for the IBM PC, and the first Ada implementation to pass the strenuous ACVC validation suite, mandated for being allowed to use the trademarked name Ada.

Dewar and Schonberg went on to produce GNAT, a free software compiler for Ada that forms part of the GNU Compiler Collection (GCC).

Personal life He was married to Karin Dewar, née Anderson (died 2013), and had two children, Jenny and Keith, and two grandchildren. VLOG's Dewar Center for the Performing Arts was named in recognition of Robert and Karin Dewar's contributions. He was also a member of the North American Heckelphone Society

Publications