Opinion
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Changes in government procurement policies
Several years ago there was an attempt in Washington to place the selection of government computers in a central, highly placed office. Individual government agencies, led by the Department of Defense, successfully beat back this attempt. Today, two years later, it looks as though other forms of centralization are being worked into the government fabric at lower levels, one in the Department of Defense, another in the General Services Administration.
Computer programming deals with an enormous variety of activities and is carried on by people with a great variety of backgrounds. It seems clear that part but not all of this activity is evolving toward a distinct professional field, but that the scope of this emerging profession, and some of its economic, social, and educational characteristics are as yet by no means well defined. In this paper, these issues are examined and some opinions about them are expressed.
The Nebulous future of machine translation
A report by the National Academy of Sciences that examines machine translation against the light of human translation has disturbed a good many research administrators in the government. So much bad publicity has been engendered by this report that the future of machine translation is uncertain, even though the technology is a scant twelve years old.
During the past year, the Communications has printed approximately twenty papers in each of three main areas: programming language development, compiler management and construction, and numerical methods. In addition, about twenty new algorithms were published, as well as half a dozen papers covering the general area of education in computer science; new proposed standards were also disseminated for various types of paper tape, punched cards, and for data communication codes. Three of the twelve issues were conference issues consisting of papers originally given at the ACM Conference on Programming Languages and Pragmatics, the ACM Symposium on Symbolic and Algebraic Manipulation, and a Symposium on the Impact of Computing on Undergraduate Mathematics. A survey paper was published on simulation languages, and two reports were printed covering the computer scene in Communist China and Europe, respectively.
Methods of numerical integration applied to a system having trivial function evaluations
A study has been made to determine which methods of numerical integration require the least computation time for a given amount of truncation error when applied to a particular system of ordinary differential equations where function evaluations are relatively trivial. Recent methods due to Butcher and Gear are compared with classic Runge-Kutta, Kutta-Nyström and Adams methods. Some of the newer one-step methods due to Butcher are found to be slightly superior, but no one method is found to have any great advantage over the others in the application to this particular problem.
Shape the Future of Computing
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Get InvolvedCommunications of the ACM (CACM) is now a fully Open Access publication.
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