| Eugene Edward McDonnell | |
| Birth Date: | 18 October 1926 |
| Death Place: | Palo Alto, California, USA |
| Citizenship: | United States |
| Fields: | Computer science |
| Workplaces: | Western Union IBM I. P. Sharp Associates |
| Alma Mater: | University of Kentucky Harvard University |
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| Known For: | Programming languages: APL, J |
| Awards: | Kenneth E. Iverson Award for Outstanding Contribution to APL, 1987 |
| Spouse: | Jeanne Farr McDonnell |
| Children: | 5 |
Eugene Edward McDonnell (October 18, 1926 – August 17, 2010) was a computer science pioneer and long-time contributor to the programming language siblings APL and J.
He was a graduate of Brooklyn Technical High School. After serving as an infantry corporal in the U.S. Army in World War II, he attended the University of Kentucky, graduating in 1949 summa cum laude, and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa. He was awarded a First Year Graduate Fellowship to Harvard University, where he studied comparative literature, particularly Dante's Divine Comedy.
Studying the poems of Robert Frost, he noticed that the first two poems in Frost's book West-Running Brook, "Spring Pools" and "The Freedom of the Moon", not only discuss reflecting, but the rhyme schemes of the two reflect each other: AABCBC and CBCBAA. When he met Frost, he was delighted to find that they had both committed the 193 lines of John Milton's "Lycidas" to memory.
His first work at IBM was in the design of IBM's first time-sharing system, which became a very early host to IVSYS (for Iverson system), a predecessor of APL. In 1968, he became a colleague of Ken Iverson, used Iverson notation before APL was named, and was active in the very earliest days of APL. He holds (3 September 1968) "Information Transfer Control System" allowing communication between two users. In 1978, he left IBM and joined I. P. Sharp Associates, retiring therefrom in 1990.
At IBM, McDonnell devised the notation for the signum and circle functions in APL, designed the complex floor function, and proposed the extension of or and and to GCD and LCM. With Iverson he was responsible for including hooks and forks in J. The result of zero divided by zero in J is as he proposed in 1976. In 1987, he won the Iverson Award.
McDonnell was the publisher of the APL Press, producing "A Source Book in APL" and "APL Quote Quad, the Early Years". He was the editor and principal contributor of the Recreational APL column in APL Quote-Quad for many years. He wrote dozens of the "At Play with J" columns in Vector, the journal of the British APL Association.[1] He contributed to Sloane's On-Line Encyclopedia of Integer Sequences.
He was a member of the Jane Austen Society of North America (JASNA), and gave a talk "Classical Persuasion" at the JASNA meeting at Lake Louise in 1993. He was active in the Bay area Jane Austen group, and wrote a topical index to the Dierdre Le Faye edition of Austen's letters, which can be seen at the Republic of Pemberley website.[2]
McDonnell died peacefully at his home in Palo Alto on August 17, 2010.[3]