[2] As a student at the Ignatius Gymnasium in Amsterdam, Meertens designed a computer with Kees Koster, a classmate.
[4] In the 1960s, Meertens applied affix grammars to the description and composition of music, and obtained a special prize from the jury at the 1968 International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP) Congress in Edinburgh for his computer-generated string quartet, Quartet No.
1 in C major for 2 violins, viola and violoncello, based on the first non-context-free affix grammar.
[8] He was the originator and one of the designers of the programming language ABC, the incidental predecessor of Python.
His original work was at the Mathematical Centre (MC), now called Centrum Wiskunde & Informatica (CWI), in Amsterdam, the Netherlands.