Mike Cowlishaw

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Mike Cowlishaw is an IBM Fellow based at IBM UK’s Warwick location, a Visiting Professor at the Department of Computer Science at the University of Warwick, and an elected Fellow of the Royal Academy of Engineering (roughly the equivalent of the NAE in the USA).

Cowlishaw joined IBM in 1974 as an electronic engineer but is best known as a programmer and writer. He is known for designing and implementing the REXX and NetRexx programming languages (published in IBM Systems Journal in 1984), and for his work on color perception, the LEXX editor (published in IBM Journal of Research and Development in 1987) for the Oxford English Dictionary, electronic publishing, [PMGlobe], the IBM Jargon file ([IBMJARG]), Java-related languages, and decimal arithmetic.

In 2002, he published a refinement of Chen-Ho encoding known as Densely Packed Decimal encoding in IEE Proceedings -- Computers and Digital Techniques.

He has also contributed to numerous computing standards, including ISO (SGML, COBOL, C, C++), BSI (SGML, C), ANSI (REXX), IETF (HTTP 1.0), W3C (XML Schema), ECMA (ECMAScript, C#, CLI), and IEEE (754r floating-point). His proposal for an improved BigDecimal (JSR 13) has been implemented in Java 5.0.

Ouside computing, he also is known as a caver. A life member of the NSS, he wrote classic articles in the 1970s and 1980s on battery technology and on the shock strength of caving ropes and caved in the UK, New England, Spain, and Mexico. He still appears to cave in Spain with [Speleogroup] and designs LED-based caving lamps etc.

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