Douglas McIlroy

American computer scientist, mathematician, engineer, and programmer

Fame51.0
Momentum0.0
Academics rank#183

Claim profile

Source-basedFalling

Fame51.0
Momentum0.0
Academics rank#183
Wikipedia1.3K

Born 1932 · age 94United States

United States AcademicsAcademic

Verify ownership in 2 minutes. Keeps the profile accurate and discoverable.

Wikipedia
24 languages
Cross-language footprint
Age
94
Born 1932
Awards
1
recognised work

Summary

Updated 2026-06-19

Malcolm Douglas McIlroy is an American mathematician, engineer, and programmer. As of 2019 he is an Adjunct Professor of Computer Science at Dartmouth College. McIlroy is best known for having originally proposed Unix pipelines and developed several Unix tools, such as echo, spell, diff, sort, join, graph, speak, and tr. He was also one of the pioneering researchers of macro processors and programming language extensibility. He participated in the design of multiple influential programming languages, particularly PL/I, SNOBOL, ALTRAN, TMG and C++.