Rod Burstall

Burstall studied physics at the University of Cambridge, then an M.Sc. in operational research at the University of Birmingham. He worked for three years before returning to Birmingham University{{cite web |url=http://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/rburstall/ |title=Rod Burstall's home page |publisher=University of Edinburgh |access-date=31 Oct 2012}} to earn a Ph.D. in 1966 with thesis titled Heuristic and Decision Tree Methods on Computers: Some Operational Research Applications under the supervision of N. A. Dudley and K. B. Haley.

Burstall was an early and influential proponent of functional programming, pattern matching, and list comprehension, and is known for his work with Robin Popplestone on COWSEL (renamed POP-1) and POP-2, innovative programming languages developed at the University of Edinburgh around 1970, and later work with John Darlington on NPL and program transformation and with David MacQueen and Don Sannella on Hope, a precursor to Standard ML, Miranda, and Haskell. In 1995, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society of Edinburgh.{{Cite news |url=https://www.rse.org.uk/fellow/rodney-burstall/|title=Professor Rodney Martineau Burstall FRSE – The Royal Society of Edinburgh |work=The Royal Society of Edinburgh |access-date=2018-03-12 |language=en-GB}} Burstall retired in 2000, becoming Professor Emeritus.{{cn|date=May 2025}}

In 2002, David Rydeheard and Don Sannella assembled a festschrift for Burstall that was published in Formal Aspects of Computing.D. Rydeheard & Don Sannella (July 2002) "A Collection of Papers and Memoirs Celebrating the Contribution of Rod Burstall to Advances in Computer Science", Formal Aspects of Computing 13(3-5): 187–193 {{doi|10.1007/s001650200006}}

In 2009, he was awarded the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) SIGPLAN Programming Language Achievement Award.{{cite web |url=http://sigplan.org/Awards/Achievement/Main |title=SIGPLAN Programming Languages Achievement Award – 2009: Rod Burstall |publisher=Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) SIGPLAN |access-date=22 September 2012}}{{cite web |url=http://vimeo.com/6654363 |title=SIGPLAN Programming Languages Achievement Award: Rod Burstall |first=Malcolm |last=Wallace |publisher=Vimeo |access-date=22 September 2012 |postscript=. Introduced by Philip Wadler.}}

Burstall died on 13 February 2025, at the age of 90.{{Cite web |last=Moore |first=J. Strother |author-link=J Strother Moore |last2=Plotkin |first2=Gordon |author-link2=Gordon Plotkin |last3=Rydeheard |first3=David |last4=Sannella |first4=Don |author-link4=Don Sannella |date=6 May 2025 |title=Rod Burstall: In Memoriam |url=https://arxiv.org/html/2505.06456v1 |access-date=16 May 2025 |website= |via=arXiv}}

• May 1971: Programming in POP-11, Edinburgh University Press.
• 1980: (with Alan Bundy) Artificial Intelligence: An Introductory Course, Edinburgh University Press.
• 1988: (with D. E. Rydeheard) Computational Category Theory, Prentice-Hall, {{ISBN|978-0131627369}}.

{{reflist}}

• [https://web.archive.org/web/20190223171337/https://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/rburstall/ University of Edinburgh home page (Archived)]
• [https://web.archive.org/web/20210225112350/http://www.freewebs.com/rodburstall/ Rod Burstall Home Page (Archived)]
• {{DBLP|name=Rod M. Burstall}}

{{POP programming}}

{{Lisp programming language}}

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Category:1934 births

Category:2025 deaths

Category:Scientists from Liverpool

Category:English computer scientists

Category:Programming language researchers

Category:Programming language designers

Category:English computer programmers

Category:Formal methods people

Category:History of computing in the United Kingdom

Category:Academics of the University of Edinburgh

Category:Alumni of the University of Cambridge

Category:Alumni of the University of Birmingham

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