Information

Ryan Stansifer
Associate Professor
Department of Computer Sciences    (Join the cs-forum mailing list)
Florida Institute of Technology
150 West University Boulevard
Melbourne, Florida 32901-6975

e-mail: ryan@cs.fit.edu
WWW: http://www.cs.fit.edu/~ryan/
Office: 245 Olin Engineering
Phone: (321) 674-7156

Spring 2008 schedule including office hours.

Students are welcome to send e-mail to me with questions or problems. Former students are also encouraged to send e-mail to me, and let me know what they are doing.

Please note that I teach a class on internationalization. I would greatly appreciate being given copies of newspapers from foreign countries, especially written in a script other than Latin.

Classes

This spring I am teaching CSE 4051: Advanced Java Concepts and CSE4251/CSE5251: Compiler Construction. Also you can enroll for one credit hour in "Computer Practicum:" CSE 4401-15: Independent Study, where we work on solving contest problems.

Professional interests

The areas of Computer Science I'm most interested in are the following:

• programming languages
• compilers
• internationalization

• the Java programming language
• functional programming and type systems
• typed, object-oriented programming
• static analysis of programs
• software development and formal verification
• character sets for representing natural languages

Grad Students

• Daniel Wetklow
• Steve Atkin

  In the international competition for the Best Thesis Award organized by Localisation Research Centre of the University of Limerick, Ireland, honorable mention is given to: "Steven Atkin of the Florida Institute of Technology (USA) for his PhD thesis 'A Framework for Multilingual Information Processing.' His thesis presents general software globalisation issues, character encoding systems, issues around bi-directional text and the enhancement of plain text as a basis for the application of metacode layers with exemplary academic depth and scholarship."

• Ramon Zatarain
• Maria Lucia Barron
• Nattawut Sridranop
• Lajos Nagy

Activities

• Local chapter of the ACM
• Programming contest
• CS Program's facilities committee

Research

Sundry papers of mine in gzipped, PostScript format:

• Completeness of Propositional Logic as a Program
• Presburger's Article on Integer Arithmetic: Remarks and Translation
• Explaining type errors in polymorphic languages
• Solving diagramless crossword puzzles
• The calculation of Easter
• Type reconstruction for coercion polymorphism (SAC)
• Method reuse in typed object-oriented languages
• Modula-3 as a Database Programming Language
• Understanding concurrent Ada programs

Stansifer, Ryan. The Study of Programming Languages. Prentice Hall, 1995. ISBN: 0-13-726936-6

Miscellaneous

In fact, I do not think that the search for high-level programming languages that are more and more satisfactory from a logical point of view can stop short of anything but a language in which (constructive) mathematics can be adequately expressed.

Per Martin-Löf

I have always wished that my computer would be as easy to use as my telephone. My wish has come true. I no longer know how to use my telephone.

Bjarne Stroustrup

Have you read The Cathedral and the Bazaar by Eric S. Raymond? Or Growing a Language by Guy Steele? How about Systems Software Research is Irrelevant. by Rob Pike?

Alfred North Whitehead and Bertrand Russell, Principia Mathematica, volume 3, second edition, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, England, 1927, page 91.

Friedrich Ludwig Gottlob Frege, Grundgesetze der Arithmetik, volume 2, H. Pohle, Jena, 1903, end of section 143 "Aufbau," page 178.

If you use the Web browser "chimera" you may be interested in the origin of the imaginary being called the Chimera as explained by Jorge Luis Borges.

The novel The Name of The Rose by Umberto Eco ends with the phrase: "stat rosa pristina nomine, nomina nuda tenemus." Eco explains this himself in a postscript.

My favorite city is Munich, Germany.

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