Koster was born on 13 July 1943, in
Haarlem, and after
World War II, his family moved to
Jakarta. At age 11 he returned to the Netherlands on his own. After his study at the
University of Amsterdam he worked at the
Mathematisch Centrum (MC) in
Amsterdam under
Adriaan van Wijngaarden. which
specified, maintains, and supports the
programming languages
ALGOL 60 and 68. Koster is the creator of the original
Compiler Description Language (CDL), and of
affix grammars, which are a variant of
Van Wijngaarden grammars. In a sense, CDL is a
deterministic executable affix grammar, while
Prolog is a non-deterministic executable affix grammar; a link acknowledged by the implementors of the original Prolog
interpreter. In 1972, Koster moved to
Berlin to initiate an informatics course at
Technische Universität Berlin. In 1977, he became the first Professor of Informatics at the
Radboud University Nijmegen. He died on 21 March 2013, aged 69, in a
motorcycle accident. ==References==