August 1986 - Vol. 29 No. 8
Features
Why Ada is not just another programming language
Ada's importance goes far beyond its initial limited goals. The worldwide interest in the usage of Ada is one of many reasons for its uniqueness.
The Department of Defense software initiative—a status report
The Initiative is a comprehensive effort to address major software engineering issues in both the military and private industry.
Self-assessment procedure XV: a self-assessment procedure dealing with file processing
A self-assessment procedure dealing with file processing
Evaluating two massively parallel machines
Two radically different parallel computers prompt a debate about the best parallel architectures and may mark the commercial viability of parallelism on the supercomputer scale.
Toward real-time performance benchmarks for Ada
Benchmarks are developed to measure the Ada notion of time, the Ada features believed important to real-time performance, and other time-related features that are not part of the language, but are part of the run-time system; these benchmarks are then applied to the language and run-time system, and the results evaluated.
Comments on “Grosch’s law re-revisited: CPU power and the cost of computation”
Taking Ein-Dor's recent reevaluation of Grosch's law one step further, the authors find evidence of different slopes for different classes of computers and the utility of an additional variable: the IBM or IBM-compatible factor. The analysis indicates that Grosch's law no longer applies to minicomputers.
GRAP—a language for typesetting graphs
The authors describe a system that makes it easy and convenient to describe graphs and to include them as an integral part of the document formatting process.
Computerized performance monitoring systems: use and abuse
An exploratory study of computerized performance monitoring and control systems reveals both positive and negative effects. Responses of 50 clerical workers from 2 organizations with computerized monitoring were compared to 94 individuals from 3 organizations in similar jobs without computerized monitoring. The results indicate that computerized monitoring is associated with perceived increases in office productivity, more accurate and complete assessment of workers' performance, and higher levels of organizational control. Respondents indicate that managers overemphasize the importance of quantity and underemphasize the importance of quality in evaluating employee performance. Workers perceive increased stress, lower levels of satisfaction, and a decrease in the quality of their relationships with peers and management as a consequence of computerized monitoring. The relevance of existing models of performance monitoring is examined in light of these findings.
The orders of equidistribution of subsequences of some asymptotically random sequences
The orders of equidistribution of subsequences of every nth term of the asymptotically random sequence given by Tootill, Robinson, and Eagle [5], and of six other asymptotically random sequences, were determined for various values of n and of the number of bits to which each term in the sequence is read. Deficiencies in equidistribution were found to be small enough to qualify the sequences for use in applications with fixed, as well as variable, dimensionality requirements. An improved initialization algorithm is also given.
