Tony Hoare

Sir Charles Antony Richard Hoare (born 11 January 1934 ), commonly known as Tony Hoare or C.A.R. Hoare, is a  best known for the development (in 1960, at age 26) of, one of the world's most widely used. He also developed for verifying program correctness, and the formal language  (CSP) to specify the interactions of  (including the ) and the inspiration for the.

Biography
Born in (, now ) to  parents, he received his  in  from the   in 1956. He remained an extra year at Oxford studying graduate-level statistics, and following his in the  (1956–1958). While he studied, he also studied of human languages at  in the  in the school of.

In 1960, he left the Soviet Union and began working at, Ltd, a small computer manufacturing firm, where he implemented and began developing major s. He became a Professor of Computing Science at the  in 1968, and in 1977 returned to Oxford as a Professor of Computing to lead the  in the , following the death of. He is now an there, and is also a principal researcher at Microsoft Research in, England.

Hoare's most significant work has been in the following areas: his sorting algorithm, , the formal language  (CSP) used to specify the interactions between es, structuring computer operating systems using the  concept, and the atic specification of s.

Quotes
The famous quote, "We should forget about small efficiencies, say about 97% of the time: premature is the root of all evil", by, has also been mistakenly attributed to Hoare (by Knuth himself), although Hoare disclaims authorship.

Speaking at a conference in 2009, Hoare apologized for inventing the : "I call it my billion-dollar mistake. It was the invention of the null reference in 1965. At that time, I was designing the first comprehensive type system for references in an object oriented language (ALGOL W). My goal was to ensure that all use of references should be absolutely safe, with checking performed automatically by the compiler. But I couldn't resist the temptation to put in a null reference, simply because it was so easy to implement. This has led to innumerable errors, vulnerabilities, and system crashes, which have probably caused a billion dollars of pain and damage in the last forty years."

Another quote around the difficulty of creating software systems which are not overly complex states: "There are two ways of constructing a software design: One way is to make it so simple that there are obviously no deficiencies, and the other way is to make it so complicated that there are no obvious deficiencies. The first method is far more difficult."

Awards

 * for "fundamental contributions to the definition and design of s". The award was presented to him at the ACM Annual Conference in, on 27 October 1980, by Walter Carlson, Chairman of the Awards committee. A transcript of Hoare's speech was published in .
 * (1981)
 * (1982)
 * Honorary Doctorate of Science by the (1987)
 * for services to and  (2000)
 * for Information Science (2000)
 * Fellow of the (2005)
 * (CHM) in Fellow of the Museum "for development of the  algorithm and for lifelong contributions to the theory of s" (2006)
 * Honorary Doctorate of Science from the Department of Informatics of the (AUEB) (2007)