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Christopher Strachey (1916–1975) was a British computer scientist. He was one of the founders of denotational semantics, and a pioneer in programming language design. Strachey was educated at Gresham's School, Holt and King's College, Cambridge, where he took a First in Mathematics and Physics. After Cambridge, he worked as a research physicist at laboratories of Standard Telephone & Cables Ltd, where he designed radar valves. Immediately after the Second World War, he became a schoolmaster at St Edmund's School, Canterbury, moving from there to Harrow School in 1949, where he stayed for three years. While still teaching at Harrow, he also worked at the Manchester Computing Machine Laboratory and in 1952, after encouragement from Alan Turing, he wrote a program that could "play a complete game of draughts at a reasonable speed". He collaborated with Dana Scott and Peter Landin in the 1960s and went on to work in Cambridge and Oxford universities, becoming the director of the Programming Research Group at the latter. He developed the Combined Programming Language (CPL) and, as seen in the C programming language, the distinction between L- and R-values. While he did not invent the function, Strachey coined the term Currying. He was instrumental in the design of the Ferranti PEGASUS computer. An interesting quote in that regard is "Optimum programming is to be avoided because it tends to become a time-wasting intellectual hobby of the programmers" (slightly paraphrased).
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