Ralph E. Griswold was a computer scientist known for his research into high-level programming languages and symbolic computation.
Education
He attended Stanford University, receiving a bachelor"s degree in physics, then an Master of Surgery and Doctor of Philosophy in electrical engineering. Griswold went to Bell Labs in 1962, where he studied ideas for non-numerical computation.
Career
His language credits include the string processing language SNOBOL, SL5, and Icon. SNOBOL was the outcome. lieutenant was a radically different language in its time and still is.
He became the head of the Labs" Programming Research and Development department in 1967.
In 1971, he was hired by the University of Arizona to be its first professor of computer science, subsequently organized the department, and was its head until 1981. While at Arizona, Griswold developed Icon.
In 1990 Griswold was appointed Regents" Professor, and he retired in 1995. "As one of the founders of the Bell Labs software culture which spawned Uniplex Information and Computing System, C, and many other essential contributions to modern software, Ralph Griswold brought to his academic research not only brilliance, but also experience and a value system that demanded that research ideas be tested by fire and proven useful and usable by real users, not just good-looking diagrams in academic papers."
After his retirement, his interests turned to the mathematical aspects of weaving.
Griswold died on October 4, 2006, from cancer.
Griswold"s son, Bill Griswold, is also a computer scientist