Robert "Bob" William Harper, Jr. is a computer science

Computer science

Computer science or computing science is the study of the theoretical foundations of information and computation and of practical techniques for their implementation and application in computer systems...

 professor at Carnegie Mellon University

Carnegie Mellon University

Carnegie Mellon University is a private research university in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, United States....

 who works in programming language

Programming language

A programming language is an artificial language designed to communicate instructions to a machine, particularly a computer. Programming languages can be used to create programs that control the behavior of a machine and/or to express algorithms precisely....

 research. He made major contributions to the design of the Standard ML

Standard ML

Standard ML is a general-purpose, modular, functional programming language with compile-time type checking and type inference. It is popular among compiler writers and programming language researchers, as well as in the development of theorem provers.SML is a modern descendant of the ML...

 programming language and the LF logical framework

LF (logical framework)

In logic, a logical framework provides a means to define a logic as a signature in a higher-order type theory in such a way that provability of a formula in the original logic reduces to a type inhabitation problem in the framework type theory. This approach has been used successfully for ...

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Harper was named an ACM

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...

 Fellow in 2005. He was awarded this honor for his contributions to type systems

Type theory

In mathematics, logic and computer science, type theory is any of several formal systems that can serve as alternatives to naive set theory, or the study of such formalisms in general...

 for programming languages.

Books

• Robin Milner
  Robin Milner
  Arthur John Robin Gorell Milner FRS FRSE was a prominent British computer scientist.-Life, education and career:...
  
  , Mads Tofte
  Mads Tofte
  Mads Tofte is a Danish computer scientist who has contributed in particular to Functional programming and the Standard ML programming language.In April 1999 he was appointed the first managing director of the IT University of Copenhagen...
  
  , Robert Harper, and David MacQueen. The Definition of Standard ML (Revised). MIT Press, 1997.
• Robert Harper (editor). Types in Compilation. Springer-Verlag Lecture Notes in Computer Science, volume 2071, 2001.
• Robert Harper. Type Systems for Programming Languages. Draft, 2000.
• Robert Harper. Programming in Standard ML. Working Draft, 2009.
• Robert Harper. Practical Foundations for Programming Languages. Working Draft, 2011.

Personal life

Harper hosts the progressive talk show Left Out on WRCT-FM

WRCT

WRCT is a non-commercial freeform radio station based in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania. The station, which is hosted in the basement of Carnegie Mellon's University Center, is run by students, staff, faculty, and community members. WRCT broadcasts on 88.3 MHz with an ERP of 1.75 kW, from atop...

 with fellow host and School of Computer Science faculty member Danny Sleator

Daniel Sleator

Daniel Dominic Kaplan Sleator is a professor of computer science at Carnegie Mellon University. He discovered amortized analysis and he invented many data structures with Robert Tarjan, such as splay trees, link/cut trees, and skew heaps. He also pioneered the theory of link grammars and developed...

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