Paul H. Cress was a Canadian

Canada

Canada is a North American country consisting of ten provinces and three territories. Located in the northern part of the continent, it extends from the Atlantic Ocean in the east to the Pacific Ocean in the west, and northward into the Arctic Ocean...

 computer scientist.

He was a young lecturer in computer science at the University of Waterloo

University of Waterloo

The University of Waterloo is a comprehensive public university in the city of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. The school was founded in 1957 by Drs. Gerry Hagey and Ira G. Needles, and has since grown to an institution of more than 30,000 students, faculty, and staff...

 (Waterloo, Ontario

Waterloo, Ontario

Waterloo is a city in Southern Ontario, Canada. It is the smallest of the three cities in the Regional Municipality of Waterloo, and is adjacent to the city of Kitchener....

, Canada) when, starting in 1966, he and his colleague Paul Dirksen led a team of programmers developing a fast Fortran

Fortran

Fortran is a general-purpose, procedural, imperative programming language that is especially suited to numeric computation and scientific computing...

 programming language compiler

Compiler

A compiler is a computer program that transforms source code written in a programming language into another computer language...

 called WATFOR

WATFIV programming language

WATFIV, or WATerloo FORTRAN IV, developed at the University of Waterloo, Canada is an implementation of the Fortran computer programming language. It is the successor of WATFOR.WATFIV was used from the late 1960s into the mid 1970s...

 (WATerloo FORtran), for the IBM System/360 family of computers. The /360 WATFOR project was initiated by Professor J. Wesley Graham, following the successful implementation in 1965 of a WATFOR compiler for the IBM 7040

IBM 7040

The IBM 7040 was a historic but short-lived model of transistor computer built in the 1960s.It was announced by IBM in December 1961, but did not ship until April, 1963. A later member of the IBM 700/7000 series of scientific computers, it was a scaled down version of the IBM 7090. It was not fully...

 computer. An enhanced version of the /360 WATFOR compiler was called WATFIV, variously interpreted to mean "WATerloo Fortran IV" or "WATFOR-plus-one".

WATFOR and WATFIV made Fortran programming accessible to university students and researchers and even high schoolers, and largely established Waterloo's early reputation as a centre for software and Computer Science research. In 1972, Cress and Dirksen were joint winners of the Grace Murray Hopper Award

Grace Murray Hopper Award

The original Grace Murray Hopper Awards have been awarded by the Association for Computing Machinery since 1971. The award goes to a young computer professional who makes a single, significant technical or service contribution.-Recipients:* 1971 Donald E. Knuth* 1972 Paul H. Dirksen* 1972 Paul H...

 from the Association for Computing Machinery

Association for Computing Machinery

The Association for Computing Machinery is a learned society for computing. It was founded in 1947 as the world's first scientific and educational computing society. Its membership is more than 92,000 as of 2009...

, "For the creation of the WATFOR Compiler, the first member of a powerful new family of diagnostic and educational programming tools."
Cress died August 20, 2004, aged 65.