Michael F. Cowlishaw

Cowlishaw 2005

Michael F. Cowlishaw , called Mike Cowlishaw , (* in Bath ) is a British computer scientist . He is known for developing the REXX programming language .

Career

After studying electrical engineering and electronics at the University of Birmingham (1974 bachelor's degree), Cowlishaw joined IBM in Great Britain as an electronics engineer at their research laboratory in Hursley . In the early 1980s he developed the Rexx programming language. In 1980 he moved to the Thomas J. Watson Research Center and in 1982 again to Great Britain to the IBM Research Center in Winchester . 1985/86 he was loaned to Oxford University Press to develop an editor for the Oxford English Dictionary (Live Parsing Editor for the SGML text, called LEXX). He also continued to work on electronic publishing and related standards. In 1995 he was significantly involved in the adaptation of Java for IBM products and ported the Java Virtual Machine to OS / 2 . He developed NetRexx, a Rexx variant for the Java VM . From 1999 to 2009 he worked on software packages for decimal arithmetic (and their implementation in various programming languages) at IBM. In 2010 he retired from IBM. He has been visiting professor at the University of Warwick since 1999 .

He is a hobby pilot and hobby cave explorer and is active in the development of various applications in these areas.

He was a founding member of the IBM Academy of Technology in 1989, received several Outstanding Technical Achievement Awards from IBM and has been an IBM Fellow since 1990 . In 1999 he became a Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering , the British Computer Society and the Institute of Engineering and Technology Lucknow (IET).

Fonts

• The NetRexx language , Prentice-Hall 1997
• The REXX Language: a practical approach to programming , Prentice-Hall 1985, 1990
  • German edition The programming language Rexx , Hanser 1988

Web links

• biography
• Interview in Dr. Dobbs Journal 1996