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A number of people directly or indirectly influenced my work and I amgrateful
for their contributions.
Norbert Ihrig made my early years in school a worthwhile experience and without
him my way would have been much harder.
Gregor Snelting proposed an interesting master thesis to me and, thus, opened
up the subsequent opportunity for a research position at the institute for “Praktische
Informatik” at the Darmstadt University of Technology. I enjoyed his lectures
and am thankful for his continued support.
Thilo Kielman introduced me to the world of being a scientist. I owe him many
hints, paper reviews, and enjoyable hours.
Alberto Pardo was my roommate over a long period and shared many stimulating
discussions with me. I would like to express my gratitude for his ever present
willingness to help and for a lot of advice in the areas of calculi and algebras. He
and Nick Dyson helped to improve the chapter on functional programming.
John Sargeant invested considerable effort to discuss the Void Value pattern
with me and provided useful information on UFO.
Dirk Koschorek provided invaluable last minute advice on SMALLTALK.
Many scientists, who I had the honor to meet at workshops or conferences, discussed
aspects of my work with me and made me reflect about it.
Gillian L. Lovegrove and J ¨ urgen Ebert accepted to be external examiners and
I am indebted to their timely efforts. I would like to thank J ¨ urgen Ebert for his
invitation to the “Bad Honnef” workshop series and for his personal interest in my
work.
Finally, I would like to express my gratitude to my thesis supervisor Wolfgang
Henhapl. He gave me all the freedom I could wish for and stimulated my work on
several occasions. He asked the question to which function objects present an answer
and challenged me to conceive the Translator design. Numerous discussions
with him created an abundance of insights for me.
I am honestly grateful to the nameless cosmic particles that hit me when I had
the idea of function objects, to replace Nil with a type specific value, to solve the
forces of internal and external iteration with multiple consumable intermediate
streams, to express functional ideas by devising a pattern system, and to rethink
the roles of languages and their environments based on the notion of tiles. |