Charles Leonard Hamblin

Charles Leonard Hamblin ( 1922 - May 14, 1985 ) was an Australian philosopher, logician and computer pioneer and professor of philosophy at the Technical University (today: University) of New South Wales in Sydney . His best-known achievements in the field of computer science include the introduction (some sources also refer to the invention) of the reverse Polish notation and - independently of and approximately simultaneously with Friedrich L. Bauer and Klaus Samelson - the invention of the stack memory . Hamblin's best-known contribution to philosophy is his book Fallacies, a standard work in the field of fallacies to this day .

Live and act

After studying mathematics, physics and philosophy at the University of Melbourne - interrupted by the Second World War and the radar service in the Australian Air Force - Hamblin received his doctorate in 1957 at the London School of Economics . From 1955 he was first a visiting lecturer, then until his death professor of philosophy at the then Technical University of New South Wales.

In the second half of the 1950s Hamblin was active on the third available in Australia computer, a copy of DEUCE (acronym for Digital Electronic Universal Computing Engine , "digital, electronic universal computing machine"), one of the (later Marconi Company and British Aerospace risen ) The English Electric company manufactured the commercial version of the Automatic Computing Engine (ACE), which Alan Turing played a key role in planning . For DEUCE, Hamblin designed one of the very first programming languages, GEORGE (acronym for General Order Generator ) based on reverse Polish notation , including the associated compiler (language translator), which converts the programs formulated in GEORGE into the machine language of the computer translated.

Hamblin's work is considered to be the first actual occupation with reverse Polish notation, which is why he is often named as the inventor of this method of representation. Regardless of the question of whether one regards the reverse Polish notation as an independent representation or - like Hamblin himself - as a variant of the ordinary Polish notation developed between 1920 and 1930 by the Polish logician and philosopher Jan Łukasiewicz (and whether Łukasiewicz himself, which is obvious, has seen both variants), Hamblin has the merit of having recognized the advantage of the reverse Polish spelling when processing on programmable computers and having specified algorithms for this.

The second immediate result of studying the development of compilers was the concept of the stack memory, which Hamblin developed independently from Friedrich L. Bauer and Klaus Samelson, who were granted a patent in 1957 for the use of a stack memory for translating programming languages. In the same year - 1957 - Hamblin presented its stacking concept at the first Australian computer conference. Hamblin's work gave the impetus for the development of stack-based computers, whose machine instructions take their arguments from a stack and then put the result back on this stack.

In the 1960s, Hamblin began to turn to philosophical questions again. In addition to an influential introductory book into formal logic , his work Fallacy, which is still considered a standard work and is in print , was created, which is dedicated to the treatment of fallacies through traditional logic and with which he brought formal dialectics to life. Hamblin is also considered to be one of the founders of modern temporal logic (logic of time) and the modern logic of questions.

Fonts

Monographs

Language and the Theory of Information. Dissertation. University of London, October 1956
Elementary Formal Logic: Programmed Course. Methuen, London 1967, ISBN 0-416-69820-4
Fallacies. Methuen, London 1970, ISBN 0-416-14570-1 and ISBN 0-416-70070-5 (paperback); New edition Vale Press, 2004, ISBN 0-916475-24-7 (paperback) - a standard work on the subject to this day
Imperatives. Blackwell, Oxford 1987, ISBN 0-631-15193-1

Influential articles

An Addressless Coding Scheme based on Mathematical Notation. In: WRE Conference on Computing, Proceedings. Weapons Research Establishment, Salisbury 1957
Computer Languages. In: The Australian Journal of Science. 20, 1957, pp. 135-139. Reprinted in The Australian Computer Journal. 17/4, November 1985, pp. 195-198
GEORGE, an Addressless Coding Scheme for DEUCE. In: Australian National Committee on Computation and Automatic Control, Summarized Proceedings of First Conference. Paper C6.1, 1960
Translation to and from Polish Notation. In: The Computer Journal. 5/3, October 1962, pp. 210-213

Web links

Charles L. Hamblin ( Memento of December 16, 2003 in the Internet Archive ), short biography by Peter McBurney (University of Liverpool), 2003
Charles L. Hamblin: Computer Pioneer ( December 24, 2003 memento on the Internet Archive ), article by Peter McBurney, 2003

Footnotes

↑ See Peter McBurney: Charles L. Hamblin: Computer Pioneer ( December 24, 2003 memento in the Internet Archive ). In: This Month in Automated Decision-Making. Issue 3, March 3, 2003
↑ The available literature coincides with the information in this paragraph; as an example, reference is made to the detailed description of a former DEUCE maintenance technician , which expressly refers to Hamblin on a subpage . See Hamblin's two 1957 and 1960 articles cited in the Scriptures section .
↑ z. B. Peter McBurney: Charles L. Hamblin: Computer Pioneer ( Memento of December 24, 2003 on the Internet Archive ) or John Kennedy: RPN Perspective. In: PPC [Personal Programmable Calculators] Calculator Journal. Vol. 9, No. 5, August 1982, pp. 26-29.
^ "[Polish] notation [...] has some other advantages. In particular Reverse Polish […] "(Hamblin 1962, page 210, emphasis in the original), note the" in particular "
^ "In particular Reverse Polish [...] has the property that the operators appear in the order in which they are required in computation." Hamblin 1962, p. 210, emphasis in the original.
↑ An overview is provided in his article Translation to and from Polish Notation from 1962.
↑ The text on this, An Addressless Coding Scheme based on Mathematical Notation, as well as the more detailed description GEORGE, an Addressless Coding Scheme for DEUCE, is listed in the Fonts section .
↑ "The English Electric KDF8 and Burroughs B5000 [...] each of [Which] uses a, push down '[...] type of store for arithmetic operands and results, Following a scheme suggested by the present author." (Hamblin 1962 S . 210)
^ Jim Mackenzie: Charles Leonard Hamblin, 1922-1985. In: Australasian Journal of Philosophy. Vol. 63, no. September 3, 1985

personal data
SURNAME	Hamblin, Charles Leonard
BRIEF DESCRIPTION	Australian philosopher, logician and computer pioneer
DATE OF BIRTH	1922
DATE OF DEATH	May 14, 1985

[1] See Peter McBurney: Charles L. Hamblin: Computer Pioneer ( December 24, 2003 memento in the Internet Archive ). In: This Month in Automated Decision-Making. Issue 3, March 3, 2003

[2] The available literature coincides with the information in this paragraph; as an example, reference is made to the detailed description of a former DEUCE maintenance technician , which expressly refers to Hamblin on a subpage . See Hamblin's two 1957 and 1960 articles cited in the Scriptures section .

[3] z. B. Peter McBurney: Charles L. Hamblin: Computer Pioneer ( Memento of December 24, 2003 on the Internet Archive ) or John Kennedy: RPN Perspective. In: PPC [Personal Programmable Calculators] Calculator Journal. Vol. 9, No. 5, August 1982, pp. 26-29.

[4] "[Polish] notation [...] has some other advantages. In particular Reverse Polish […] "(Hamblin 1962, page 210, emphasis in the original), note the" in particular "

[5] "In particular Reverse Polish [...] has the property that the operators appear in the order in which they are required in computation." Hamblin 1962, p. 210, emphasis in the original.

[6] An overview is provided in his article Translation to and from Polish Notation from 1962.

[7] The text on this, An Addressless Coding Scheme based on Mathematical Notation, as well as the more detailed description GEORGE, an Addressless Coding Scheme for DEUCE, is listed in the Fonts section .

[8] "The English Electric KDF8 and Burroughs B5000 [...] each of [Which] uses a, push down '[...] type of store for arithmetic operands and results, Following a scheme suggested by the present author." (Hamblin 1962 S . 210)

[9] Jim Mackenzie: Charles Leonard Hamblin, 1922-1985. In: Australasian Journal of Philosophy. Vol. 63, no. September 3, 1985