Henry Spencer at U of Toronto Zoology

(From a FaceSaver image.)

From Henry's election information for the 1994 USENIX board of directors:

I've been a UNIX systems programmer for 19 years now, first at University of Saskatchewan as an undergrad, then at University of Toronto as a graduate student and an employee, now as an independent consultant.

I ran the first Usenet site in Canada, and am well-known as a Usenet contributor in many areas, notably the space and C groups.  Geoff Collyer and I wrote C News. I just finished a first draft of the replacement for RFC 1036 (the standard for news article format and processing), and David Lawrence and I are rewriting O'Reilly's Nutshell Handbook on managing Usenet.

I've written various pieces of freely-available software: the public-domain getopt, the first redistributable string library, the widely-used redistributable regular-expression library, the 4.4BSD POSIX regular-expression library, the awf text formatter, etc.  I also wrote The Ten Commandments For C Programmers, and the ``regular expressions'' chapter for the forthcoming ``Software Solutions in C'' (Academic Press).

I participated in the public reviews of the ANSI C standard, am on the Standards Council of Canada working group that formulates the Canadian position at ISO on C and related subjects, and was a member of the POSIX.2 technical working groups on regular expressions and awk.  

I was co-chair of the demonstrations track for the CHI+GI 87 conference (sponsored by ACM SIGCHI and CIPS CMCCS).  I was on the program committee for the 1989 winter USENIX, and am on the program committee for the USENIX VHLL Workshop this autumn.  I've been the assistant to the Terminal Room Coordinator, and technical trouble-shooter for the terminal room, at the last ten USENIXes.


References to Henry Spencer in the C programming subtree:
Kernighan & Ritchie: The C Programming Language, Second Edition (errata)
It's missing Henry Spencer's observation.

Tom Duff on Duff's Device
Even Henry Spencer who hit every other nail square on the end with the flat round thing stuck to it, made a mistake (albeit a trivial one).

The Ten Commandments for C Programmers (Annotated Edition)
by Henry Spencer

Clive D.W. Feather
``If you lie to the compiler, it will get its revenge.'' -- Henry Spencer

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