James Cordy

James Cordy is a Canadian computer scientist and educator, Professor Emeritus in the School of Computing at Queen's University, who was born on 2 January 1950. He is best known for the TXL source transformation language, a parser-based framework and functional programming language for software analysis and transformation, which he began in 1985 with master's student Charles Halpern-Hamu as a tool for experimenting with programming language design. Earlier work in programming languages included the design of Concurrent Euclid in 1980 and Turing in 1983 with R. C. Holt, and the implementation of the Euclid and SP/k languages, along with the S/SL compiler technology and an orthogonal code generation method that came out of his own graduate theses. His later research covers source code analysis and manipulation, software reverse engineering and software architecture, including the NICAD clone detector built on TXL. He directed the Queen's School of Computing from 2002 to 2007, was elected an ACM Distinguished Member in 2008 and received the CS-Can/Info-Can Lifetime Achievement Award in 2019.