Pat Terry - some biographical details

Curriculum Vitae

Education

Academic qualifications

My postgraduate studies in Physics, both at the MSc and PhD level, were largely dependent on computer simulations. At Rhodes this led me to become an early user of the newly installed ICL1301 computer, and to dabble extensively in simple compiler writing and systems programming, so as best to exploit the limited potential of the machine. My PhD studies in Cambridge, where I was supervised by Kenneth Budden, FRS, also had the side effect of exposed me for the first time to time-sharing computers at the famous Mathematical Laboratory where Wilkes and others were developing the Atlas computer, multi-access systems etc.

Major academic awards

Academic positions

I have served long spells as Assistant Dean, and later Deputy Dean of the Faculty of Science over the period 1982 to the present. I declined nomination to become Dean of the Faculty a few years ago, fearing too great an impact on my departmental commitments. However, I have largely assumed responsibility for administering the annual registration of students and practical scheduling in the Faculty, and the scrutiny of examination results. As from 1999 I shall be assuming the role of Dean of Faculty.

University Distinguished Teaching Award

In 1992 I was awarded the Vice-Chancellor's Award for Distinguished Teaching. This I regard as one of the major highlights of a career which I have very much enjoyed.

Other university commitments

In addition, I have been responsible over the years for development of models to aid the budgetting for both Capital Equipment and Library Grants across the University, and for the design of some of the present lecturing and practical timetable as it affects the Sciences. I was also largely responsible for designing the Faculty approach to providing "Foundation Curricula" for handling the increasing number of underprepared, underprivileged students entering the Science Faculty, which has turned out to be successful. More recently I was chair of a subcommittee looking into semesterization proposals for the Science Faculty. I have also been responsible for developing various computer systems to assist with the registration of new students arriving at the university, and to assist with the analysis of various data required by the ministry of education.

Visiting positions

Leisure interests

Choral music and the classical music of the Highland Bagpipe (Piobaireachd).

Teaching interests in Computer Science

My teaching interests since 1980 have mostly been in the areas of programming languages, program design, and programming language implementation.

Besides my departmental teaching commitments, I have become involved in other aspects of promoting teaching.

I have served as external examiner at both Wits (1987 - 1991) and UCT (1988 - 1992). I have also examined several MSc and PhD theses here and abroad.

I was one of the early contributors to the seminars run by the TLSC in the late 70's, and helped organize and give lectures in the new lecturer's orientation programme (NLOC) for several years from about 1987 - 1990.

Outside the university I have often contributed talks on teaching (and in particular on our approach here at Rhodes) to the annual meetings of SACLA (South African Computer Lecturers Association) - again, this group is largely informal, and the material presented is not usually "published" in the formal sense.

I gave an invited course on programming in Modula-2 to an audience at Wits in 1988, and have given various lectures to schools at various times.

Current interests

In 1985-1986, while completing my book on Modula-2, I made contact with the BSI standards group working on Modula-2, and was invited to join them. In 1987 I was invited to join WG13, the ISO work group standardizing Modula-2, and attended seven of their eight meetings since then, where I think I made fairly major input contributions to the design of the proposed libraries and to the scrutiny and revision of the English text that accompanies the formal (VDM) definition. I was also a member of the P1151 US work group engaged in the same process. None of this work resulted in any formal publications (outside the draft standard itself, which has a very limited audience). Find out more about WG13 from my page of reminiscences.

As a result of being part of this group, many contacts were established. I have received invitations to visit Australia, and to act on program committees for the Joint Modular Languages Conference, the last of which, JMLC'97, took place at the Johannes Kepler University in Linz, Austria in March 1997 (another is planned for September 2000). In addition, various small collaborative projects have been undertaken with members of the WG13 group. For example, work was done on refining Coco/R, a Modula-2 compiler generator originally developed in by Hanspeter Mössenböck in Linz, and work was also done refining the FST Modula-2 compiler emanating originally from the USA. More recently I have collaborated (entirely by e-mail, as it happens) with Frankie Arzu in Guatemala on converting Coco/R to C++, and with Hanspeter Mössenböck in refining a Java version of Coco/R

Publication effort

My major publication effort has been directed to the publication of textbooks, which, of course, reflects my interest in teaching. While lecturing in Applied Mathematics I worked up several courses to the point where text-books would have evolved very quickly, but did not carry these through, partly because the field was already over-subscribed, and partly because of the change of direction towards computing. As a result of my teaching experience in Computer Science four books have appeared to date, one of which has been translated into Polish.

The first of these was quite widely used at senior undergraduate level here and abroad. It is of interest to report that the material also spawned various undergraduate and postgraduate projects, including a very interesting one done in Ireland which led to various other collaborative work:

"Programming Language Translation - a practical approach" (Addison-Wesley, 1986)

The second is the text used for our first year course from 1987 - 1995. It developed out of an earlier course using Pascal, which was never published formally, but which was distributed to many schools under the title "A simplified introduction to Pascal" along with an instructor's manual entitled "A Pascal work book" when Computer Studies took off. This book appeared in English and Polish editions:

"Introduction to Programming with Modula-2" (Addison-Wesley, 1987)

"Uczymy sie progromowac na przykladzie Moduli-2" (Wydawnictwa Naukowo- Technizne, Warsaw, 1992)

A short, but effective book was written to capture a niche market that existed at the time (1986) when students were largely being taught tp program firstly in Pascal, and then being required to learn Fortran as a second language:

"Fortran from Pascal" (Addison-Wesley, 1987)

During my last sabbatical leave (1995 - 1996) I produced a completely new edition of my earlier compiler book, which recognized the importance of C++, and also of using compiler generating tools as well as hand-crafted techniques:

"Compilers and Compiler generators: An introduction with C++" (International Thomson, 1997)

Journal articles published:

Conference papers on teaching Computer Science

Internal papers contributed to the WG13 standardization effort

Departmental technical reports

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