Robert Dewar
| Robert Dewar | |
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Robert Dewar
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| Born | Robert Berriedale Keith Dewar June 21, 1945 Oxford, England, United Kingdom |
| Died | June 30, 2015 (aged 70) Bennington, Vermont, United States |
| Institutions |
AdaCore New York University |
| Known for | President and CEO of AdaCore |
Robert Berriedale Keith Dewar (June 21, 1945 – June 30, 2015) was an English-born American computer scientist and educator. He helped to develop software languages and compilers and was an outspoken advocate of freely licensed open source software. He was a founder, CEO and president of AdaCore software company. He was also an enthusiastic amateur performer and musician, especially with the Village Light Opera Group in New York City.
Dewar was born in Oxford, England, one of two sons of the theoretical chemist Michael J. S. Dewar and Mary Dewar, née Williamson, 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 obtained his B.S. from the University of Chicago in 1964, and his Ph.D. in chemistry, also from the University of Chicago, in 1968. He began to work with computers during graduate school.
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, becoming chair of the department.
He was Chairman of IFIP Working Group 2.1 from 1978 to 1983 and Associate Director of the Courant Institute of Mathematical Sciences from 1994 to 1997. Until his death, he was President of AdaCore, which he co-founded in 1994, also serving as its CEO until 2012. 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.
While at the IIT, Dewar created the original SPITBOL compiler together with Ken Belcher in 1971, and Macro SPITBOL with Tony McCann in 1974. These implementations of SNOBOL4, which quickly gained widespread popularity, are still being used today In the 1970s he was a principal author of the Realia COBOL compiler, also still widely used in commercial environments today (marketed by Computer Associates).
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