William D. Clinger is an associate professor in the Khoury College of Computer Sciences at Northeastern University.
[1] He is known for his work on higher-order and functional programming languages, and for extensive contributions in helping create and implement international technical standards for the programming language Scheme via the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE) and American National Standards Institute (ANSI).
[4] Clinger obtained his PhD from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) under the supervision of Carl Hewitt.
His doctoral research revolved around defining a denotational semantics for the actor model of concurrent computing,[5] which is the same model of computing that originally motivated development of Scheme.
[8] He also invented efficient algorithms for hygienic macro expansion, accurate decimal-to-binary conversions, and bounded-latency generational garbage collection.