June 1962 - Vol. 5 No. 6
Features
In retrospect, it is obvious that Charles Babbage, when writing these words, had Howard Aiken in mind. In July 1961, twenty-four years after conceiving the idea that led…
A redundancy check for ALGOL programs
In using ALGOL, or any other common language for communicating among computers with different input-output media, one or more human beings is normally present in the…
The final result of prolonged computations will in general contain some errors. These errors are composed in part of computational round-off errors. This note points out…
A note on sampling a tape-file
The problem of selecting a random sample of precisely n records from a tape film containing N records sometimes arises in data processing applications. If a means of…
Analytic differentiation by computer
During the past few years a major portion of the work in computer applications has been concentrated in the two closely related fields of automatic programming and symbol…
General language translation schemata
In the past Backus Normal Form (BNF) has been defined only informally; however, a formal recognition definition has been evolved.
Criteria for acceptable abstracts
Recently, a personal reaction to a published abstract started a study which may lead to criteria for abstracts. This particular abstract seemed inadequate to those who…
Trajectory computation in a problem-oriented language
A new problem-oriented language, XYZ, is being used on an experimental basis for trajectory computation. In the experiment, XYZ is compared with FORTRAN to determine the…
