James W. Hunt

Life & Legacy

James Wayne Hunt (August 5, 1952 – March 21, 2021) was an African-American computer scientist and inventor. He invented the Hunt–Szymanski algorithm and Hunt–McIlroy algorithm algorithms. It was one of the first non-heuristic algorithms used in diff. To this day, variations of this algorithm are found in incremental version control systems, wiki engines, and molecular phylogenetics research software. The research accompanying the final version of Unix diff, written by Douglas McIlroy, was published in the 1976 paper "An Algorithm for Differential File Comparison", co-written with James W. Hunt, who developed an initial prototype of diff.