Don Libes

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Don Libes is a computer scientist at NIST performing computer science research on interoperability. He works in the Manufacturing Systems Integration Division, which performs research on software integration methods, creating custom software that implements draft standards and serves as an interface to other components provided by separate vendors.

Libes is responsible for numerous implementations of STEP, a family of ISO standards and draft standards for product management. He is the creator of the NIST Identifier Collaboration Service, a free service to allow collaborative management of unmanaged namespaces. Libes is also responsible for one of the earliest network-shared memory ports on UNIX and the first port of XINU on UNIX.

Libe's book Obfuscated C Code and Other Mysteries is the only book to explain the winners in the Obfuscated C Code Contest. Each winning entry is de-obfuscated step-by-step so as to make them accessible to programmers in such a way that useful techniques and skills can be learned from each winner.

Libes is best known for Expect, public-domain software for automating and testing interactive applications such as telnet, ftp, passwd and hundreds of other programs have no internal control language (or too limited of a control language) of their own. Expect can also be used to glue software together to produce synergistic effects. Example of this technique include xkibitz, multixterm, and passmass. Multixterm allows the user to type to multiple xterms to different hosts simultaneously. Passmass automates the process of updating passwords on multiple hosts, each with different password requirements and interactions. Don is also responsible for Expectk which glues Expect to Tk thereby allowing an archaic character-graphic or line-oriented program to be entirely hidden with a modern graphical user interface. His article, Writing a Tcl Extension in only 7 Years is a classic on the subject of computer programming language extensions.


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