February 1966 - Vol. 9 No. 2

A feature-by-feature comparison is made of five different implementations of FORTRAN IV representing three different manufacturers. A table is constructed showing, where possible, the use of each feature in each implementation. Only those items which are different from, or have been added to FORTRAN II are shown.

BUGSYS is a picture processing and measuring system that depends upon a pictorial input to the computer's memory. BUGSYS can be used for many types of applications. In particular, the authors have used the system for the analysis of linear graphs. The main concept of the system is the use of a collection of programmable pointers, which are visualized as a family of “bugs.”

In this section the algorithmic language EULER is described first informally and then formally by its syntax and semantics. An attempt has been made to generalize and extend some of the concepts of ALGOL, thus creating a language which is simpler and yet more flexible than ALGOL 60. A second objective in developing this language was to show that a useful programming language which can be processed with reasonable efficiency can be defined in rigorous formality.

Sectional Committee X.3 of the American Standards Association, has charged one of its task groups, X3.3.4, with the responsibility to “Define and specify functional control requirements and characteristics governing the operation of digital data generating and receiving systems interconnected by communication system.” This effort is primarily directed toward systems employing the American Standard Code for Information Interchange (ASCII). This paper represents a progress report on the work of this group toward a proposal for national and international standardization in the field of control procedures. It describes both the old and new work of the task group. The new work is presented in detail, while the work that has been presented in earlier papers [“Control Procedures for Data Communication,” Task Group document X3.3.4/44, May 1964: “Transparent-Mode Control Procedures for Data Communication,” Task Group document X3.3.4/58, December, 1964: Comm. ACM 8 (Apr. 1965), 203-206; “Control Procedures for Data Communication,” Task Group document X3.3.4/60, March, 1965] is retained here in summary form. Many of the concepts and principles described herein have been submitted to the International Organization for Standardization via earlier papers and are now embodied in working papers of that organization.

Many business applications employ sequential magnetic tape rather than random-access storage techniques to process a very small number of transactions against a voluminous master file. In such situations, it may prove economical to avoid creating a new master file during each updating run by producing instead a dribble ledger containing only those master file accounts which have experienced activity.

In any prolonged computation it is generally assumed that the accumulated effect of roundoff errors is in some sense statistical. The purpose of this paper is to give precise descriptions of certain probabilistic models for roundoff error, and then to describe a series of experiments for testing the validity of these models. It is concluded that the models are in general very good. Discrepancies are both rare and mild. The test techniques can also be used to experiment with various types of special arithmetic.

The problem of the region of stability of the fourth order-Runge-Kutta method for the solution of systems of differential equations is studied. This region can be characterized by means of linear transformation but can not be given in a closed form. In the paper, this region is determined by the electronic digital computer Z22.

The operating system for the UNIVAC 1107 at Case Institute is reviewed. The system is of interest because of the low turn-around times achieved, the high throughput achieved and the lack of an operating staff. Turnaround times below 5 minutes and job volume above 75,000 per quarter year are reported.