Luca Andrea Cardelli FRS is an Italian computer scientist who works as a research professor at the University of Oxford in the United Kingdom. Cardelli is well-known for his work in type theory and operational semantics. In the field of programming languages, he helped create the language Modula-3, built the first compiler for the (non-pure) functional language ML, introduced the idea of typeful programming, and contributed to the development of the experimental language Polyphonic C#.

Education

He was born in Montecatini Terme, Italy. He attended the University of Pisa before earning his PhD from the University of Edinburgh in 1982 under the guidance of Gordon Plotkin.

Career and research

Before joining the University of Oxford in 2014 and Microsoft Research in Cambridge, UK in 1997, he worked at Bell Labs and Digital Equipment Corporation. During this time, he helped develop Unix software such as vismon.

In 2004, he was named a Fellow of the Association for Computing Machinery. In 2005, he was elected a Fellow of the Royal Society (FRS). In 2007, Cardelli received the Senior AITO Dahl–Nygaard Prize, which honors Ole-Johan Dahl and Kristen Nygaard.

Trivia

In the late 1980s, while working at DEC, Cardelli designed and shared the Dijkstra font, a computer font that copies Edsger W. Dijkstra 's handwriting.