Hans Zima

Hans Peter Zima is an Austrian-trained computer scientist whose career centred on programming languages and compilers for parallel computers. He received his doctorate in mathematics and astronomy from the University of Vienna in 1964 and began in computing at a company owned by the German computer pioneer Konrad Zuse. In the early 1970s he designed PROGRESS, one of the first high-level real-time programming languages, at System Development Corporation in Santa Monica. He was professor of computer science at the University of Bonn from 1975 to 1989, where work linked to the SUPRENUM supercomputer produced SUPERB, the first Fortran-based compilation system for distributed-memory machines. After a year at Rice University he took a professorship in Vienna in 1989 and led the 1992 definition of Vienna Fortran with Barbara Chapman and Piyush Mehrotra. He later became a principal scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, retiring in 2011, and is credited as one of the four designers of the Chapel language developed in the Cascade project.