Walter Bright

Walter Bright is an American computer programmer who created the D programming language, the Zortech C++ compiler and the Empire computer game. He taught himself programming from type-in listings in a book of BASIC games, graduated from Caltech in 1979 with a degree in mechanical engineering, and wrote Empire for the PDP-10 while a student. He later developed the Datalight C compiler and was the main developer of the Zortech C++ compiler, the first C++ compiler to translate source code directly to object code without using C as an intermediate step.