James H. Morris
Advertisement
Author Archives
Andrew: a distributed personal computing environment
The Information Technology Center (ITC), a collaborative effort between IBM and Carnegie-Mellon University, is in the process of creating Andrew, a prototype computing and communication system for universities. This article traces the origins of Andrew, discusses its goals and strategies, and gives an overview of the current status of its implementation and usage.
The experiences of Mesa's first users—primarily its implementers—are discussed, and some implications for Mesa and similar programming languages are suggested. The specific topics addressed are: module structure and its use in defining abstractions, data-structuring facilities in Mesa, an equivalence algorithm for types and type coercions, the benefits of the type system and why it is breached occasionally, and the difficulty of making the treatment of variant records safe.
A proof method, subgoal induction, is presented as an alternative or supplement to the commonly used inductive assertion method. Its major virtue is that it can often be used to prove a loop's correctness directly from its input-output specification without the use of an invariant. The relation between subgoal induction and other commonly used induction rules is explored and, in particular, it is shown that subgoal induction can be viewed as a specialized form of computation induction. A set of sufficient conditions are presented which guarantee that an input-output specification is strong enough for the induction step of a proof by subgoal induction to be valid.
A bonus from van Wijngaarden’s device
In [1] van Wijngaarden presented a rather remarkable technique for rewriting ALGOL 60 programs to eliminate all labels. The purpose of this note is to point out that the rewriting would also eliminate the use of array returning (procedure returning, label returning, etc.) procedures had they been legal constructs of ALGOL 60. Hence, the many languages which allow such things to be returned as procedure values are not such large extensions of ALGOL 60 as one might think [2, 3, 4, 5].
Shape the Future of Computing
ACM encourages its members to take a direct hand in shaping the future of the association. There are more ways than ever to get involved.
Get Involved