10 Facts About Peter Landin

Peter John Landin was a British computer scientist.

Peter Landin was one of the first to realise that the lambda calculus could be used to model a programming language, an insight that is essential to the development of both functional programming and denotational semantics.

On his retirement, he was appointed Emeritus Professor of Theoretical Computation at Queen Mary University of London, where in 2012, the computer science building was renamed the Peter Landin Building in his honour.

Peter Landin was active in the definition of the ALGOL programming language.

Peter Landin is listed among those who attended the November 1959 conference in Paris, and the 1962 conference, and cited by Tony Hoare as one of the people who taught him ALGOL 60 and hence facilitated his expression of powerful recursive algorithms:.

Peter Landin was involved with international standards in programming and informatics, as a member of the International Federation for Information Processing IFIP Working Group 2.1 on Algorithmic Languages and Calculi, which specified, maintains, and supports the programming languages ALGOL 60 and ALGOL 68.

Peter Landin is responsible for inventing the stack, environment, control, dump SECD machine, the first abstract machine for a functional programming language, and the ISWIM programming language, defining the Peter Landin off-side rule and for coining the term syntactic sugar.

Peter Landin, who was bisexual, became involved with the Gay Liberation Front during the early 1970s.

Peter Landin was once arrested as part of an anti-nuclear demonstration.

Peter Landin was a dedicated cyclist and moved around London on his bike until it became physically impossible for him to do so.