Paul H. Cress
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Paul H. Cress (1939-2004) was a Canadian computer scientist who was one of the co-creators of the first Fortran compiler.
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Cress was a young lecturer in computer science at the University of Waterloo (Waterloo, Ontario, Canada) when in 1966 he worked with colleague Paul Dirksen to develop a simplified Fortran compiler for the IBM 7040, called WATFOR.
A version for the IBM 360/75 soon followed. WATFOR and its sequel, WATFIV, made programming accessible not only to university students but to high schoolers as well, and largely established Waterloo's early reputation as a centre for software and CS research. In 1972, Cress and Dirksen were joint winners of the Grace Murray Hopper Award from the Association for Computing Machinery, "For the creation of WATFOR Compiler, the first member of a powerful new family of diagnostic and educational programming tools." Paul Cress died August 20, 2004, aged 65.
