Dr. Plauger should need no introduction to the C community. He has been deeply involved with C since its creation. He was working at Bell Labs when C and UNIX were created. He later founded Whitesmiths, Ltd., one of the early major C compiler vendors. He is presently secretary of the ANSI C standards committee, X3J11, and convenor of the international ISO C standards committee, WG14. His latest book is Standard C, co-authored with Jim Brodie. He is also author of our very popular "Standard C" column.

Dr. Plauger's influence, though, has reached far beyond just the C community. Together with Brian Kernighan, he co-authored two significant and classic texts. The Elements of Programming Style, a delightful takeoff on Strunk and White's classic, championed the view that programs should be written to be read, long before that view was popular. Software Tools (and later Software Tools in Pascal) cogently demonstrated the power of UNIX-like tool design. You need only count the number of Software Tools implementations in the CUG library to appreciate how forcefully this book affects programmers.

In recent months I have found it increasingly difficult to find enough time to attend properly to both my responsibilities as publisher and editor. I'm pleased to be able to shift the major editorial responsibilities to someone as competent, both technically and editorially, as Dr. Plauger. I'm also excited about this change because I believe it extends our ability to continually improve the quality of the information we deliver.

Sincerely Yours,

Robert Ward
Publisher & (Short Time) Editor