Paul H. Cress

Who was Paul H. Cress?

Paul H. Cress was a Canadian computer scientist.

He was a young lecturer in computer science at the University of Waterloo when, starting in 1966, he and his colleague Paul Dirksen led a team of programmers developing a fast Fortran programming language compiler called WATFOR, for the IBM System/360 family of computers. The /360 WATFOR project was initiated by Professor J. Wesley Graham, following the successful implementation in 1965 of a WATFOR compiler for the IBM 7040 computer. An enhanced version of the /360 WATFOR compiler was called WATFIV, variously interpreted to mean "WATerloo Fortran IV" or "WATFOR-plus-one".

WATFOR and WATFIV made Fortran programming accessible to university students and researchers and even high schoolers, and largely established Waterloo's early reputation as a centre for software and Computer Science 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 the WATFOR Compiler, the first member of a powerful new family of diagnostic and educational programming tools." Cress died August 20, 2004, aged 65.