XI Международная студенческая научная конференция Студенческий научный форум - 2019

As a child, Niklaus Wirth was fond of aircraft modeling and the construction of rockets, the fascination with electronics and software control systems began with the development of remote control devices for models. In 1954, he entered the Faculty of Electronics at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich, where in four years he got a bachelor's degree in electrical engineering. He continued his studies at the University of Laval (Quebec, Canada), in 1960 he got a master's degree. Then he was invited to the University of California at Berkeley (USA), where in 1963, under the guidance of Professor Harry Husky, he defended his thesis. The subject of the thesis was the Euler programming language - the Algola extension by means of the Lisp language.

Virta's thesis was noticed by the community of developers of programming languages, and in 1963 he was invited to the Algol Standardization Committee IFIP (International Federation of Informatics), which developed the new Algol language standard, which later became Algol-68. Together with Charles Hoar Wirth, he defended in the committee the development of a moderately modified version of Algol, free from the shortcomings of the original language and supplemented by a minimum of really necessary funds.

Wirth and Hoar presented to the committee the language Algol-W (W - from Wirth), which was just such a processing of Algol, but no one supported them. At the end of the committee’s work in 1968, Wirth was among those who criticized Algol 68 and spoke of its lack of reliability and extreme redundancy. In parallel, from 1963 to 1967, Wirth worked as an assistant at Stanford University (USA). Together with Jim Wales, he developed and implemented the PL/360 language, intended for programming on the IBM/360 platform, an Algol-like language, which introduced a number of system-dependent features related to the IBM/360 architecture.

In 1967 he returned to the University of Zurich with the rank of assistant professor, in 1968 he got the title of professor of computer science at ETH. In 1970, he created the Pascal programming language. In the 1970s, he developed, together with Hoar and Dijkstra, a structured programming technology. Wirth's article “Program Development by Stepwise Refinement”, published in 1971, described and substantiated the top-down software development methodology.

In 1975, he developed the Modula language in which he implemented the ideas of developing modular programs with well-defined inter-module interfaces and parallel programming. In addition, in the Module, the syntax of the language was changed - Wirth removed the need to use compound operators in branching constructions and cycles. Modula was not widely known and had only one experimental implementation. But its modified version of Modula-2, intended for the implementation of the system software of the 16-bit personal computer Lilith, has become known and quite popular. The Lilith system has overtaken computer industry trends for several years and has great potential.

In the 1970s, Wirth took part in a contest by the US Department of Defense to develop a new language for programming embedded systems. As a result, Wirth created the Ada language. The story with Algol 68 is repeated - the project of the group in which Wirth and Hoar worked was not approved by the committee on language. As a result, a complex and voluminous project based on Pascal won the competition.

From 1982 to 1984 and from 1988 to 1990, Wirth headed the Department of Computer Science at ETH, since 1990 - the Institute of Computer Systems at ETH.

In 1988, Wirth developed the Oberon programming language. The purpose of the development was to create a language for the implementation of the system software of the designed new workstation. The basis for Oberon became Modula-2, which was significantly simplified, but at the same time supplemented with new features.

In 1992, Wirth released a message about a new programming language - Oberon-2, a minimally extended version of Oberon. In the same year Oberon microsystems was formed. The company engaged in the development of systems Oberon. Wirth became one of the members of its board of directors. In 1999, this company released the next version of Oberon - Component Pascal, which was adapted for component programming. In 1996, Wirth developed another original programming language - Lola, a simple teaching language for the formal description and simulation of digital electrical circuits.

June 19, 2007 Virtu was awarded the degree of honorary doctorate of the Russian Academy of Sciences.

Wirth is also popular due to the discovery of the Wirth's law. It’s an adage on computer performance which states that software is getting slower more rapidly than hardware becomes faster.

Wirth adhered to the fact that programming should be a normal engineering discipline, guaranteeing a sufficient level of reliability of their developments. The achievement of reliability is possible, according to Wirth, in only one way: by the maximum possible simplification of both the systems themselves and the tools that are used to create them. In accordance with this principle, the languages and programming systems developed by Wirth have always been a model of “reasonable sufficiency”.