GrammaTech Co-Founders Honored for Historical Research

President, Thomas Reps and CEO, Tim Teitelbaum, Co-founders of GrammaTech, Inc., were honored by the Association for Computing Machinery’s Special Interest Group on Software engineering (ACM SIGSOFT) and selected to receive a 2010 Retrospective Impact Paper Award for their 1984 paper, “The Synthesizer Generator.”

ACM SIGSOFT recognizes papers that have been decidedly influential in software engineering research and are judged by their influence since the time of publication. The Synthesizer Generator is a tool for creating specialized program editors from formal language descriptions. Such editors incrementally maintain a derived database of facts about the object that is being edited; for example, when applied to the editing of computer programs, the derived facts may include context-sensitive error reports and generated object code, in effect embedding a compiler into the editor.

The Synthesizer Generator was an outgrowth of “Generating Language-Based Environments”, the Ph.D thesis of Dr. Reps that was supervised by Dr. Teitelbaum at Cornell University and received the 1983 the ACM Doctoral Dissertation Award. Reps and Teitelbaum founded GrammaTech in 1988 to commercialize this work. The Synthesizer Generator is still in use by GrammaTech customers, although it is no longer being actively marketed.

Reps is a currently a Professor of Computer Science at University of Wisconsin, which he joined in 1985. He is the author or co-author of four books and more than one hundred fifty papers describing his research. His work has focused on many topics including program slicing, dataflow analysis, pointer analysis, model checking, computer security, code instrumentation, and language-based program-development environments.

Teitelbaum is currently an Emeritus Professor in the Department of Computer Science at Cornell University, which he joined in 1973. His university research focused on incremental algorithms and interactive development environments. He is well known in the academic community as the creator of the Cornell Program Synthesizer, one of the seminal systems that established the viability of integrated development environments (IDEs).