Cornelis H. A. Koster
Cornelis Hermanus Antonius "Kees" Koster was a Dutch computer scientist who was a professor in the Department of Informatics at the Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands.
Born in Haarlem, his family moved to Jakarta after the war. At the age of 11 he returned to the Netherlands on his own. After his study at the University of Amsterdam he worked at the Mathematisch Centrum in Amsterdam under Adriaan van Wijngaarden.
There he was one of the editors of the original Report on the Algorithmic Language ALGOL 68, being responsible for the design of.
He became a member of the International Federation for Information Processing IFIP Working Group 2.1 on Algorithmic Languages and Calculi, which supports and maintains the programming languages ALGOL 60 and 68.
He was the creator of the original Compiler Description Language. He is also the creator of affix grammars, which are a variant of Van Wijngaarden grammars. In a sense, CDL is a deterministic executable affix grammar, while Prolog is a non-deterministic executable affix grammar.
In 1972, he moved to Berlin to initiate an informatics course at the Technical University of Berlin. In 1977 he became the first Professor of Informatics at the Radboud University Nijmegen. He died in a motorcycle accident in 2013.
