computer science

L. Peter Deutsch

L. Peter Deutsch is a computer science topic covered in the lgStudy science library. This page brings together a partial reference excerpt, illustrations, worked examples, real-world applications and a short study plan, so you can understand L. Peter Deutsch rather than just read about it. In short: L Peter Deutsch (born Laurence Peter Deutsch on August 7, 1946, in Boston, Massachusetts) is an American computer scientist and composer. He is the founder of Aladdin Enterprises and creator of Ghostscript, a free software PostScript and PDF interpreter.

Key takeaways

L. Peter Deutsch belongs to computer science; place it in that map before memorising details.
Learn the definition first, then one example that makes the definition concrete.
Connect L. Peter Deutsch to a quantity you can measure, compute or draw — that is where exam questions come from.
Reproduce the core statement of L. Peter Deutsch from memory before moving on to harder problems.

Reference excerpt

L Peter Deutsch (born Laurence Peter Deutsch on August 7, 1946, in Boston, Massachusetts) is an American computer scientist and composer. He is the founder of Aladdin Enterprises and creator of Ghostscript, a free software PostScript and PDF interpreter. Deutsch's other work includes the Smalltalk implementation that inspired Java just-in-time compilation technology about 15 years later.

Name Deutsch changed his legal first name from "Laurence" to "L" on September 12, 2007. His published work and other public references before that time generally use the name L. Peter Deutsch (with a dot after the L).

Early life Deutsch's father was the physicist Martin Deutsch, a professor at MIT.

Contributions to computer science Deutsch wrote the PDP-1 Lisp 1.5 implementation and first REPL, Basic PDP-1 LISP, "while still in short pants" and finished it in 1963, when he was 17 years old. He collaborated with Calvin Mooers on the TRAC programming language and wrote its first implementation, on the PDP-1, in 1964. From 1964 to 1967, during his study at the University of California, Berkeley, he worked with Butler Lampson and Charles P. Thacker on the Berkeley Timesharing System, which became the standard operating system for the SDS 940 mainframe that would later be used by Tymshare, NLS, and Community Memory. Deutsch is the author of several Request for Comments (RFCs), The Eight Fallacies of Distributed Computing, and originated the Deutsch limit adage about visual programming languages. Deutsch received a Ph.D. in computer science from the University of California, Berkeley in 1973, and has previously worked at Xerox PARC and Sun Microsystems. In 1994, he was inducted as a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery.

Composer After auditing undergraduate music courses at Stanford University, in January 2009, he entered the postgraduate music program at California State University, East Bay, and was awarded a Master of Arts (M.A.) in March 2011. As of mid-2011, he has had six compositions performed at public concerts, and now generally identifies himself as a composer rather than a software developer or engineer.

Literature Some stories about him are included in the book Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution. An interview with him is printed in Coders at Work. Bjarne Stroustrup attributes to Deutsch the epigraph of Chapter 4 of The C++ Programming Language -- "To iterate is human, to recurse is divine."

References

External links L. Peter Deutsch's PIVOT program verification system (thesis and source code) RFCs authored or co-authored by L. Peter Deutsch: RFC 190, RFC 446, RFC 550, RFC 567, RFC 606, RFC 1950, RFC 1951 and RFC 1952 L. Peter Deutsch in conversation with Stig Hackvän at the Wayback Machine (archived October 13, 2004) L Peter Deutsch's web page related to music, including link to scores and MIDI files

Worked examples

Example 1 — a first encounter with L. Peter Deutsch

Start with the simplest possible case. Write down what L. Peter Deutsch claims or describes in one sentence, then invent the smallest concrete situation in which that sentence is true. In computer science, the smallest case is usually a single object, a single equation or a single measurement. Check that every symbol or term in your sentence has a meaning in that case.

Example 2 — changing one variable

Take the situation from Example 1 and change exactly one quantity: double it, halve it, or set it to zero. Predict what should happen to L. Peter Deutsch before you calculate. Comparing your prediction with the result is the fastest way to find out whether you understand the idea or only the words.

Example 3 — an exam-style question

Typical questions about L. Peter Deutsch ask you to (a) state it precisely, (b) apply it to given data, and (c) explain a limitation. Practise writing all three answers in under five minutes; the third part is what separates a full-mark answer from an average one.

Applications of L. Peter Deutsch

In research: L. Peter Deutsch appears in computer science research whenever the underlying quantities have to be modelled precisely. Papers usually cite it as a starting assumption and then explore where it breaks down.
In technology and industry: Engineering practice reuses L. Peter Deutsch in design rules, simulations and safety margins. Knowing the idea lets you read a specification sheet and understand why the numbers look the way they do.
In the classroom: L. Peter Deutsch is common in secondary-school and first-year university syllabi. It links to neighbouring topics 1946 births, American computer specialist stubs, Fellows of the Association for Computing Machinery, so understanding it makes those chapters shorter.
In everyday life: Look for L. Peter Deutsch outside the textbook — in sport, cooking, traffic, electronics or the sky above you. An example you found yourself is remembered far longer than one you were given.

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How to study L. Peter Deutsch in 20 minutes

Read the reference excerpt below once, without taking notes.
Close the page and write down what L. Peter Deutsch means in your own words.
Compare your version with the excerpt and mark what you missed.
Work through the three examples above with pen and paper.
Explain L. Peter Deutsch out loud to somebody else — or to Teacher Smith in the lgStudy chat.

Frequently asked questions

What is L. Peter Deutsch in simple terms?

Why does L. Peter Deutsch matter?

Because it connects several computer science ideas at once: it gives you a definition you can apply, a quantity you can calculate, and a way to check whether a result is plausible.

How should I study L. Peter Deutsch?

Read the excerpt, restate it from memory, then work through the examples and applications listed on this page. The five-step study plan above takes about twenty minutes.

What does this page cover?

It gives you a compact reference excerpt plus original lgStudy explanations, examples, applications and study material on L. Peter Deutsch.