About David

David Turner is best known as the inventor of combinator graph reduction and for designing and implementing a series of purely functional programming languages – SASL (1972), KRC (1981) and the commercially supported Miranda (1985) - that had a strong influence on the development of the field and on the emergence of Haskell.

He invented or coinvented many of the ideas which are now standard in functional programming, including pattern matching with guards, list comprehensions and the "list of successes" method for eliminating backtracking.

David has a D.Phil. from the University of Oxford and has held professorships at Queen Mary College, London, University of Texas at Austin and the University of Kent at Canterbury, where he has spent most of his career and is now Emeritus Professor of Computation. He is also an Emeritus Professor at Middlesex University, England.