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THE SCHOOL

ICHBIAH Jean

Engineer, computer scientist

Birth : 1940[Paris]
Death : 2007[Boston]
Promotion IPC : 1965

 

Jean Ichbiah, a grandson of Greek and Turkish immigrants, was a brilliant student.He was the main designer of the Ada programming language between 1977 and 1983, responding to a US Department of Defence (DoD) tender.

Portrait of ICHBIAH © ENPC
Portrait of ICHBIAH © ENPC

Biography

 

On leaving the École polytechnique in 1963, he chose École des Ponts et Chaussées.In 1964, he moved to the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in Boston, where he prepared a thesis on the syntactical analysis of programming languages.Returning to France in 1967, he was taken on as a programmer at the new company CII-Bull, where he worked on the rewriting of the Siris 7 operating system for the Iris 80, which was the most powerful computer built by CII in the 1970s and which was installed in university computer centres and INRIA as well as other research institutions.He then became involved in the LIS (Systems Implementation Language) Project, a 2-layer language inspired by Modula 2 and Simula, intended to make systems portable.However, this language had to be kept secret.Since his team was threatened by the merger of CII and Honeywell Bull, he proposed it to represent Honeywell in the Ada tender, launched at the request of the US defence agency, which brought 17 teams into competition.The name Ada was chosen in reference to Ada Lovelace (real name Augusta Ada King 1815-1852) who is thought to have written the first embryonic computer programme, through the description of Charles Babbage’s analytical engine.In 1995, Ada became the first standardised international object-oriented language.It is still widely used today, mainly for real-time programs in aeronautics (on-board code found in the Rafale, Mirage 2000, Boeing 777) and transport (like the 14 Meteor line which uses Ada for its automatic pilot, and for opening and closing its doors).Ada is also a strong presence in space (Helios II satellite and international space station).Jean Ichbiah left Honeywell-CII-Bull in 1980 and founded Alsys (Ada Language Systems).After selling the company to Thomson in 1991, he went to the US to found Textware Solutions, a company specialising in fast text input solutions.Jean Ichbiah was a member of the French Academy of Sciences, a recipient of the Legion of Honour and of a Certificate of Distinguished Service from the US Defence Department in recognition of his work on Ada.