John Cocke
* May 30, 1925, Charlotte, North Carolina, USA
✝ July 16, 2002, Valhalla, New York, USA
ACM A.M. Turing Award - 1987
For significant contributions in the design and theory of compilers, the architecture of large systems and the development of reduced instruction set computers (RISC); for discovering and systematizing many fundamental transformations now used in optimizing compilers including reduction of operator strength, elimination of common subexpressions, register allocation, constant propagation, and dead code elimination.