| p:abstract
| - Leonard "Len" H. Tower Jr. (born June 17, 1949) is a hacker and activist in the free software movement, environmentalist, artist, poet, and gardener. An Eagle Scout, Tower was also awarded the Vigil Honor in the Order of the Arrow. In 1971, he received a B.S. in biology from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology where he held several management roles at [http://www-tech.mit.edu/ The Tech], the student newspaper, and became active in Alpha Phi Omega and other service organizations as he has remained throughout his life. He is well known for his software development and community relations for, and his organization, administration, and support of the GNU Project's Free Software Foundation and the League for Programming Freedom. In addition to being an original coauthor of gcc and GNU diff as used in MediaWiki, Len is an avid cyclist and pedestrian who has never owned a car. He was the first full time staff at the FSF, working on the creation of the GNU C compiler (now known as GNU Compiler Collection), rewriting it from an extended dialect of Pascal which was difficult to bootstrap, into portable C, and redesigning parts of the parser, register transfer language generator and definitions, and the VAX machine description. Quoting Richard Stallman in February, 1986:
:"Although I have a portable C and Pascal compiler, it has a serious drawback: it is a very large program, and intrinsically cannot be made smaller. It is also very hard to bootstrap.
:"The problem is that most of the compiler is written in Pastel, a super-hairy extended Pascal, and it is also the sole compiler for that language. To make it smaller, we must eliminate the hair needed to compile Pastel; then we will not be able to compile Pastel, so it must all be rewritten into C.
:"Len Tower, the sole full-time GNU staff person, is working on this, with one or two assistants."
In March 1987, Tower posted Stallman's announcement of the first beta release of gcc.
Tower was also one of the creators of GNU diff, a file comparison utility. Diff has been incorporated into hundreds of other programs, including MediaWiki, where it was "extracted verbatim from analyze.c (GNU diffutils-2.7)."
During the late 1980s and early 1990s, Tower spoke at USENIX conferences as the official representative of the FSF. In 1987, the FSF described Tower primarily as a programmer who also did some administrative tasks; he managed mailing lists, newsgroups, and requests for information. (en)
|
| rdfs:comment
| - Leonard "Len" H. Tower Jr. (born June 17, 1949) is a hacker and activist in the free software movement, environmentalist, artist, poet, and gardener. An Eagle Scout, Tower was also awarded the Vigil Honor in the Order of the Arrow. In 1971, he received a B.S. (en)
|
![[RDF Data]](http://dbpedia.org/statics/sw-cube.png)
