Richard C. "Ric" Holt is a computer science

Computer science

Computer science or computing science is the study of the theoretical foundations of information and computation and of practical techniques for their implementation and application in computer systems...

 professor.

Ric Holt was one of the original developers of the Turing programming language

Turing programming language

Turing is a Pascal-like programming language developed in 1982 by Ric Holt and James Cordy, then of University of Toronto, Canada. Turing is a descendant of Euclid, Pascal and SP/k that features a clean syntax and precise machine-independent semantics....

, Grok programming language, Euclid programming language

Euclid programming language

Euclid is an imperative programming language for writing verifiable programs. It was designed by Butler Lampson and associates at the Xerox PARC lab in the mid 1970s. The implementation was led by Ric Holt at the University of Toronto and James Cordy was the principal programmer for the first...

, SP/k

SP/k

SP/k is a programming language developed circa 1974 by R.C. Holt, D.B. Wortman, D.T. Barnard and J.R. Cordy as a subset of the PL/I programming language designed for teaching programming...

, and of the S/SL programming language

S/SL programming language

The Syntax/Semantic Language is an executable high level specification language for recursive descent parsers, semantic analyzers and code generators developed by James Cordy, Ric Holt and David Wortman at the University of Toronto in 1980....

. He also did early research on deadlock theory

Deadlock

A deadlock is a situation where in two or more competing actions are each waiting for the other to finish, and thus neither ever does. It is often seen in a paradox like the "chicken or the egg"...

, operating systems and transcontinental hitchhiking

Hitchhiking

Hitchhiking is a means of transportation that is gained by asking people, usually strangers, for a ride in their automobile or other road vehicle to travel a distance that may either be short or long...

 protocols during his pre-Cyber Mennonite

Mennonite

The Mennonites are a group of Christian Anabaptist denominations named after the Frisian Menno Simons , who, through his writings, articulated and thereby formalized the teachings of earlier Swiss founders...

 youth.

After a distinguished career at the University of Toronto

University of Toronto

The University of Toronto is a public research university in Toronto, Ontario, Canada, situated on the grounds that surround Queen's Park. It was founded by royal charter in 1827 as King's College, the first institution of higher learning in Upper Canada...

, he retired and took up a position at the University of Waterloo

University of Waterloo

The University of Waterloo is a comprehensive public university in the city of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada. The school was founded in 1957 by Drs. Gerry Hagey and Ira G. Needles, and has since grown to an institution of more than 30,000 students, faculty, and staff...

, where he has been Nortel Networks Chair for Telecommunications Software Engineering.

He has served as the President of Gravel Watch Ontario since 2003.

In the fall of 2005, he was named #16 on Computing Canada's list of top 30 IT movers and shakers in the country for the last 30 years.

Ric Holt has also been known to have cured cancer. yep

External links

• http://plg.uwaterloo.ca/~holt/