Jean Ichbiah


Jean David Ichbiah was a French computer scientist and the initial chief designer of Ada, a general-purpose, strongly typed programming language with certified validated compilers.

Early life

Ichbiah was a descendant of Greek and Turkish Jews from Thessaloniki who emigrated to France.

Career

From 1972 to 1974, he worked on designing an experimental system implementation language called LIS, based on Pascal and Simula. He was also one of the founding members of IFIP WG 2.4 on Systems Implementation Languages.
He then joined CII Honeywell Bull in Louveciennes, France, becoming a member of the Programming Research division.
Ichbiah's team submitted a language design labelled "Green" to a competition to choose the United States Department of Defense's embedded programming language. When Green was selected in 1978, he continued as chief designer of the language, now named "Ada". In 1980, Ichbiah left CII-HB and founded the Alsys corporation in La Celle-Saint-Cloud, which continued language definition to standardize Ada 83, and later went into the Ada compiler business, also supplying special validated compiler systems to NASA, the US Army, and others. He later moved to the Waltham, Massachusetts subsidiary of Alsys.
In the 1990s, Ichbiah designed the keyboard layout FITALY, which is specifically optimized for stylus or touch-based input. Subsequently, he started the Textware Solutions company, which sells text entry software for PDAs and tablet PCs, as well as text-entry software for medical transcription on PCs.

Awards and honors

In 1979, Jean Ichbiah was designated a chevalier of the French Legion of Honour and a correspondent of the French Academy of Sciences. He received a Certificate of Distinguished Service from the United States Department of Defense for his work on Ada.

Death

Jean Ichbiah died from complications of a brain tumor on January 26, 2007.