Brian W. Kernighan

Brian W. Kernighan is head of the Computing Structures Research Department, Bell Laboratories, Murray Hill, New Jersey. He received a B.A.Sc in engineering physics from the University of Toronto in 1964, and a Ph.D. in electrical engineering from Princeton University in 1969. Since joining Bell Labs in 1969, he has worked in combinatorial optimization, document preparation systems, programming languages, and software tools. His current research interests are in application-oriented programming languages, programming methodology, and user interfaces.

Dr. Kernighan is the co-author of several books, including ``The C Programming Language'' and ``The UNIX Programming Environment''.

: - From the ``official biography'' of an announcement for a lecture about ``Programming Style in C'' in April 1995.

Brian Kernighan is in the Computing Science Research Center at Murray Hill, where he has been in the same office since 1969. (It has been painted once.) He writes programs and occasionally books. The latter are better than the former, and certainly need less maintenance.

: - From the ``unofficial biography'' of the same announcement.

References to Brian W. Kernighan in the C programming subtree:

Why Pascal is Not My Favorite Programming Language: Brian W. Kernighan, April 2, 1981
Tom Duff on Duff's Device: Many people (even bwk?) have said that the worst feature of C is that switches don't break automatically before each case label.
Programming in C: A Tutorial: Brian W. Kernighan
Errata: The C Programming Language, 2nd Edition: As the C standard wended its way through the approval process and became final, Brian and I prepared fixes to put in new printings of the second edition of ``The C Programming Language.''
The Ten Commandments for C Programmers (Annotated Edition): The One True Brace Style referred to is that demonstrated in the writings of the First Prophets, Kernighan and Ritchie.
Mark Brader on the B Language: Also in 1969, the system that Brian Kernighan would later name Unix was being developed by Ken Thompson "with some assistance from" Dennis Ritchie.
Rob Pike: With Bart Locanthi he designed the Blit terminal; with Brian Kernighan he wrote The Unix Programming Environment.
The ANSI C Rationale: The vast majority of the language defined by the Standard is precisely the same as is defined in Appendix A of The C Programming Language by Brian Kernighan and Dennis Ritchie, and as is implemented in almost all C translators.

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