July 1960 - Vol. 3 No. 7

Recently there have appeared several proposals for expanded character sets. In general, these differ in the following respects: the number of characters in the expanded set, the characters selected, card and/or tape code representation, and superscripting and subscripting techniques. Currently, it seems to be popular to talk in terms of establishing a “standard expanded character set.” In the opinion of the author, this will prove to be extremely difficult in practice and undesirable in theory. This does not mean, however, that there should be no attempt to achieve “minimal standard character subsets” for communication purposes and “universal languages.”

One of the most important and useful of the tasks which an international organization concerned with some specialized branch of pure or applied science is particularly well able to perform is the improvement of the technical terminology appertaining to that.

The scheduling algorithm examines the programs to be scheduled one by one and places their component rectangles in the corresponding load diagrams according to a set of placement rules.

The article by Robert W. Floyd in the March 1960 issue described an algorithm for determining whether a given symbol string is a permissible ALGOL assignment statement. In his method Mr. Floyd replaces certain character pairs by single characters in an array until, in the well-formed formula, the character &Sgr; is obtained. Although this method indeed determines formation legality, one must still analyze and delimit each constituent of the statement in order to reduce the problem language to a workable format.