David Turner

David A. Turner was a British computer scientist who lived from January 26, 1946 to October 19, 2023. He is best known for designing and implementing programming languages, including the first for functional programming based on lazy evaluation, combinator graph reduction and polymorphic types: SASL in 1972, the Kent Recursive Calculator in 1981, and the commercially supported Miranda in 1985, whose influence on the later Haskell language was strong. He received his Doctor of Philosophy from the University of Oxford in 1981, supervised by Christopher Strachey and Dana Scott, and held professorships at Queen Mary College London, the University of Texas at Austin and the University of Kent at Canterbury, where he spent most of his career and retained the title of Emeritus Professor of Computation.