Daniel P. Friedman

Who is Daniel P. Friedman?

Daniel Paul Friedman is a professor of Computer Science at Indiana University in Bloomington, Indiana. His research focuses on programming languages, and he is a prominent author in the field.

With David Wise, Friedman wrote a highly influential paper on lazy programming, specifically on lazy streams. The paper, entitled "Cons should not evaluate its arguments," is one of the first publications pushing for the exploration of a programming style with potentially infinite data structures and a form of programming that employs no computational effects. Over the 1970s, Friedman and Wise explored the topic in depth and also considered extensions to the world of parallel computing.

In the 1980s, Friedman turned to the study of Scheme. He explored the use of macros for defining programming languages; with Kohlbecker, Felleisen, and Duba, he co-introduced the notion of 'hygienic macros' in a 1986 LFP paper that is still widely cited today. With Haynes and Wand, he simultaneously studied the nature of continuation objects, their uses, and the possibilities of constraining them. Following that, Friedman and Felleisen introduced a lambda calculus with continuations and control operators. Their work has spawned work on semantics, connections between classical logic and computation, and practical extensions of continuations.