Ralph Anthony Brooker (22 September 1925 – 20 November 2019),[1] was a British computer scientist known for developing the Mark 1 Autocode.
This was taken over by Sid Michaelson[3] and K. D. Tocher and incorporated into ICCE, the Imperial College Computing Engine based on the same technology.
[4] By then (1949)Brooker had moved to the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory to work for Maurice Wilkes on software development for EDSAC.
It was his experience with the rather tedious Manchester machine-coding conventions that led him to devise what was probably the world's first publicly available High-Level Language.
This culminated in the compiler-compiler, a seminal idea first presented at a British Computer Society Conference in July 1960 by Brooker and Derrick Morris.