Cornelis H. A. Koster

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Cornelis Hermanus Antonius Koster (13 July 1943 – 21 March 2013) was a Dutch computer scientist and professor at Radboud University Nijmegen in the Netherlands.

He was born in Haarlem. After World War II his family moved to Jakarta, and he returned to the Netherlands by himself at age 11. He studied at the University of Amsterdam and then worked at the Mathematisch Centrum in Amsterdam under Adriaan van Wijngaarden.

There he helped edit the original report on ALGOL 68 and was responsible for parts of its design, including its transput. He worked to develop international standards in programming as a member of IFIP Working Group 2.1, which covered ALGOL 60 and ALGOL 68.

Koster created the Compiler Description Language (CDL) and invented affix grammars, a variant of Van Wijngaarden grammars. In a sense, CDL is a deterministic executable affix grammar, while Prolog is a nondeterministic executable affix grammar, a relationship noted by the early Prolog implementers.

In 1972 he moved to Berlin to start an informatics course at the Technical University of Berlin. In 1977 he became the first Professor of Informatics at Radboud University Nijmegen. He died in a motorcycle accident on 21 March 2013, aged 69.