In Memoriam

By CRA Staff

Former CRA Board member Jim Horning passed away peacefully on January 18, 2013. Jim served on the CRA Board from 2001-04, and remained active with CRA including serving as CRA representative to various external groups.

He was a leader in programming language design and implementation and received his Ph.D. from Stanford in 1969, where he co-authored (with Bill McKeeman and Dave Wortman) the highly regarded book "A Compiler Generator" describing the XPL system.

Horning is best remembered by his graduate students for his exhaustive markup of papers and dissertations in multiple colors - green for typos, blue for questions, red for glaring conceptual errors, etc.  Ed Lazowska, on whose Ph.D. committee Horning served, claims to hold the record for the greatest number of colors on a single page:  seven.