Jørn Jensen


Jørn Jensen was one of the earliest Danish programmers. Examined as a mechanical engineer and had worked with electromechanical construction. In 1958 employed at the Danish Regnecentralen, and very soon exhibited an extraordinary programming skill. He developed the main parts of the base programs to DASK, the first Danish computer – among others, he designed a collection of monitor programs to supervise the program running schedule on DASK. In tight collaboration with Peter Naur and others, he developed reliable, well documented compilers to the ALGOL 60 programming language. In this context he invented Jensen's Device, an ingenious exploitation of the name parameters to compute numerical series without using procedure parameters – as is necessary in all programming languages, except ALGOL 60, and Simula-67.
After circa 20 years at Regnecentralen he continued his career as a systems programmer among others in the Brown Boveri company.