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Jensen's Device
Jensen's device is a computer programming technique that exploits call by name. It was devised by Danish computer scientist Jørn Jensen, who worked with Peter Naur at Regnecentralen. They worked on the GIER ALGOL compiler, one of the earliest correct implementations of ALGOL 60. ALGOL 60 used call by name. During his Turing Award speech, Naur mentions his work with Jensen on GIER ALGOL. Description Jensen's device exploits ''call by name'' and ''side effects''. Call by name is an argument passing convention that delays the evaluation of an argument until it is actually used in the procedure, which is a consequence of the copy rule for procedures. ALGOL introduced call by name. A classic example of Jensen's device is a procedure that computes the sum of a series, \textstyle\sum_^u a_k: real procedure Sum(k, l, u, ak) value l, u; integer k, l, u; real ak; comment k and ak are passed by name; begin real s; s := 0; for k := l ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Call By Name
In a programming language, an evaluation strategy is a set of rules for evaluating expressions. The term is often used to refer to the more specific notion of a ''parameter-passing strategy'' that defines the kind of value that is passed to the function for each parameter (the ''binding strategy'') and whether to evaluate the parameters of a function call, and if so in what order (the ''evaluation order''). The notion of reduction strategy is distinct, although some authors conflate the two terms and the definition of each term is not widely agreed upon. A programming language's evaluation strategy is part of its high-level semantics. Some languages, such as PureScript, have variants with different evaluation strategies. Some declarative languages, such as Datalog, support multiple evaluation strategies. The calling convention consists of the low-level platform-specific details of parameter passing. Example To illustrate, executing a function call f(a,b) may first evaluat ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Communications Of The ACM
''Communications of the ACM'' (''CACM'') is the monthly journal of the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM). History It was established in 1958, with Saul Rosen as its first managing editor. It is sent to all ACM members. Articles are intended for readers with backgrounds in all areas of computer science and information systems. The focus is on the practical implications of advances in information technology and associated management issues; ACM also publishes a variety of more theoretical journals. The magazine straddles the boundary of a science magazine, trade magazine, and a scientific journal. While the content is subject to peer review, the articles published are often summaries of research that may also be published elsewhere. Material published must be accessible and relevant to a broad readership. From 1960 onward, ''CACM'' also published algorithms, expressed in ALGOL. The collection of algorithms later became known as the Collected Algorithms of the ACM. CA ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Man Or Boy Test
The man or boy test was proposed by computer scientist Donald Knuth as a means of evaluating implementations of the ALGOL 60 programming language. The aim of the test was to distinguish compilers that correctly implemented "recursion and non-local references" from those that did not. Knuth's example In ALGOL 60: begin real procedure A(k, x1, x2, x3, x4, x5); value k; integer k; real x1, x2, x3, x4, x5; begin real procedure B; begin k := k - 1; B := A := A(k, B, x1, x2, x3, x4) end; if k ≤ 0 then A := x4 + x5 else B end; outreal(1, A(10, 1, -1, -1, 1, 0)) end This creates a tree of ''B'' call frames that refer to each other and to the containing ''A'' call frames, each of which has its own copy of ''k'' that changes every time the associated ''B'' is called. Trying to work it through on paper is probably fruitless, but for ''k'' = 10, the correct answer is −67, despite the fact that in the original article Knuth conjectured i ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Funarg Problem
In computer science, the funarg problem ''(function argument problem)'' refers to the difficulty in implementing first-class functions (functions as first-class objects) in programming language implementations so as to use stack-based memory allocation of the functions. The difficulty only arises if the body of a nested function refers directly (i.e., not by argument passing) to identifiers defined in the environment in which the function is defined, but not in the environment of the function call. A standard resolution is either to forbid such references or to create closures. There are two subtly different versions of the funarg problem. The upwards funarg problem arises from returning (or otherwise transmitting "upwards") a function from a function call. The downwards funarg problem arises from passing a function as a parameter to another function call. Upwards funarg problem When one function calls another during a typical program's execution, the local state of the caller (in ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Duff's Device
In the C programming language, Duff's device is a way of manually implementing loop unrolling by interleaving two syntactic constructs of C: the - loop and a switch statement. Its discovery is credited to Tom Duff in November 1983, when Duff was working for Lucasfilm and used it to speed up a real-time animation program. Loop unrolling attempts to reduce the overhead of conditional branching needed to check whether a loop is done, by executing a batch of loop bodies per iteration. To handle cases where the number of iterations is not divisible by the unrolled-loop increments, a common technique among assembly language programmers is to jump directly into the middle of the unrolled loop body to handle the remainder. Duff implemented this technique in C by using C's case label fall-through feature to jump into the unrolled body. Original version Duff's problem was to copy 16-bit unsigned integers ("shorts" in most C implementations) from an array into a memory-mapped output regist ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Call Stack
In computer science, a call stack is a Stack (abstract data type), stack data structure that stores information about the active subroutines and block (programming), inline blocks of a computer program. This type of stack is also known as an execution stack, program stack, control stack, run-time stack, or machine stack, and is often shortened to simply the "stack". Although maintenance of the call stack is important for the proper functioning of most software, the details are normally hidden and automatic in high-level programming languages. Many computer instruction sets provide special instructions for manipulating stacks. A call stack is used for several related purposes, but the main reason for having one is to keep track of the point to which each active subroutine should return control when it finishes executing. An active subroutine is one that has been called, but is yet to complete execution, after which control should be handed back to the point of call. Such activatio ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Closure (computer Science)
In programming languages, a closure, also lexical closure or function closure, is a technique for implementing lexically scoped name binding in a language with first-class functions. Operationally, a closure is a record storing a function together with an environment. The environment is a mapping associating each free variable of the function (variables that are used locally, but defined in an enclosing scope) with the value or reference to which the name was bound when the closure was created. Unlike a plain function, a closure allows the function to access those ''captured variables'' through the closure's copies of their values or references, even when the function is invoked outside their scope. History and etymology The concept of closures was developed in the 1960s for the mechanical evaluation of expressions in the λ-calculus and was first fully implemented in 1970 as a language feature in the PAL programming language to support lexically scoped first-class func ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Thunk (functional Programming)
In computer programming, a thunk is a subroutine used to inject a calculation into another subroutine. Thunks are primarily used to delay a calculation until its result is needed, or to insert operations at the beginning or end of the other subroutine. They have many other applications in compiler code generation and modular programming. The term originated as a whimsical irregular form of the verb ''think''. It refers to the original use of thunks in ALGOL 60 compilers, which required special analysis (thought) to determine what type of routine to generate. Background The early years of compiler research saw broad experimentation with different evaluation strategies. A key question was how to compile a subroutine call if the arguments can be arbitrary mathematical expressions rather than constants. One approach, known as "call by value", calculates all of the arguments before the call and then passes the resulting values to the subroutine. In the rival "call by name" approach ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Side Effect (computer Science)
In computer science, an operation, function or expression is said to have a side effect if it has any observable effect other than its primary effect of reading the value of its arguments and returning a value to the invoker of the operation. Example side effects include modifying a non-local variable, a static local variable or a mutable argument passed by reference; raising errors or exceptions; performing I/O; or calling other functions with side-effects. In the presence of side effects, a program's behaviour may depend on history; that is, the order of evaluation matters. Understanding and debugging a function with side effects requires knowledge about the context and its possible histories. Side effects play an important role in the design and analysis of programming languages. The degree to which side effects are used depends on the programming paradigm. For example, imperative programming is commonly used to produce side effects, to update a system's state. By contrast ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Denmark
Denmark is a Nordic countries, Nordic country in Northern Europe. It is the metropole and most populous constituent of the Kingdom of Denmark,, . also known as the Danish Realm, a constitutionally unitary state that includes the Autonomous administrative division, autonomous territories of the Faroe Islands and Greenland in the north Atlantic Ocean.* * * Metropolitan Denmark, also called "continental Denmark" or "Denmark proper", consists of the northern Jutland peninsula and an archipelago of 406 islands. It is the southernmost of the Scandinavian countries, lying southwest of Sweden, south of Norway, and north of Germany, with which it shares a short border. Denmark proper is situated between the North Sea to the west and the Baltic Sea to the east.The island of Bornholm is offset to the east of the rest of the country, in the Baltic Sea. The Kingdom of Denmark, including the Faroe Islands and Greenland, has roughly List of islands of Denmark, 1,400 islands greater than in ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Association For Computing Machinery
The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) is a US-based international learned society for computing. It was founded in 1947 and is the world's largest scientific and educational computing society. The ACM is a non-profit professional membership group, reporting nearly 110,000 student and professional members . Its headquarters are in New York City. The ACM is an umbrella organization for academic and scholarly interests in computer science (informatics). Its motto is "Advancing Computing as a Science & Profession". History In 1947, a notice was sent to various people: On January 10, 1947, at the Symposium on Large-Scale Digital Calculating Machinery at the Harvard computation Laboratory, Professor Samuel H. Caldwell of Massachusetts Institute of Technology spoke of the need for an association of those interested in computing machinery, and of the need for communication between them. ..After making some inquiries during May and June, we believe there is ample interest to ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
ALGOL 60
ALGOL 60 (short for ''Algorithmic Language 1960'') is a member of the ALGOL family of computer programming languages. It followed on from ALGOL 58 which had introduced code blocks and the begin and end pairs for delimiting them, representing a key advance in the rise of structured programming. ALGOL 60 was one of the first languages implementing function definitions (that could be invoked recursively). ALGOL 60 function definitions could be nested within one another (which was first introduced by any programming language), with lexical scope. It gave rise to many other languages, including CPL, PL/I, Simula, BCPL, B, Pascal, and C. Practically every computer of the era had a systems programming language based on ALGOL 60 concepts. Niklaus Wirth based his own ALGOL W on ALGOL 60 before moving to develop Pascal. Algol-W was intended to be the next generation ALGOL but the ALGOL 68 committee decided on a design that was more complex and advanced rather than a cleaned ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
