Paul H. Dirksen was a Canadian computer scientist at the University of Waterloo, where beginning in 1966 he and colleague Paul H. Cress led a team of programmers that developed WATFOR, a fast diagnostic Fortran compiler for the IBM System/360, later followed by WATFIV. Dirksen and Cress received the ACM Grace Murray Hopper Award in 1972 for the creation of the WATFOR Compiler, described by the award as the first member of a powerful new family of diagnostic and educational programming tools, and the two later co-authored the textbook Fortran IV with Watfor and Watfiv with J. Wesley Graham. Dirksen died April 8, 2023, at age 83.
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