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TPK Algorithm
The TPK algorithm is a simple program introduced by Donald Knuth and Luis Trabb Pardo to illustrate the evolution of computer programming languages. In their 1977 work "The Early Development of Programming Languages", Trabb Pardo and Knuth introduced a small program that involved arrays, indexing, mathematical functions, subroutines, I/O, conditionals and iteration. They then wrote implementations of the algorithm in several early programming languages to show how such concepts were expressed. To explain the name "TPK", the authors referred to Grimm's law (which concerns the consonants 't', 'p', and 'k'), the sounds in the word "typical", and their own initials (Trabb Pardo and Knuth). In a talk based on the paper, Knuth said: The algorithm Knuth describes it as follows:Donald Knuth, ''TPK in INTERCAL'', Chapter 7 of ''Selected Papers on Fun and Games'', 2011 (p. 41) In pseudocode: ask for 11 numbers to be read into a sequence ''S'' reverse sequence ''S'' for each ''ite ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Computer Program
A computer program is a sequence or set of instructions in a programming language for a computer to Execution (computing), execute. It is one component of software, which also includes software documentation, documentation and other intangible components. A ''computer program'' in its human-readable form is called source code. Source code needs another computer program to Execution (computing), execute because computers can only execute their native machine instructions. Therefore, source code may be Translator (computing), translated to machine instructions using a compiler written for the language. (Assembly language programs are translated using an Assembler (computing), assembler.) The resulting file is called an executable. Alternatively, source code may execute within an interpreter (computing), interpreter written for the language. If the executable is requested for execution, then the operating system Loader (computing), loads it into Random-access memory, memory and ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Short Code (computer Language)
Short Code was one of the first higher-level languages developed for an electronic computer. Unlike machine code, Short Code statements represented mathematic expressions rather than a machine instruction. Also known as automatic programming, the source code was not compiled but executed through an interpreter to simplify the programming process. The execution time was, naturally, much slower. History Short Code was proposed by John Mauchly in 1949 and originally known as Brief Code. William Schmitt implemented a version of Brief Code in 1949 for the BINAC computer, though it was never debugged and tested. The following year Schmitt implemented a new version of Brief Code for the UNIVAC I, where it was now known as Short Code (also Short Order Code). A revised version of Short Code was developed in 1952 for the Univac II by A. B. Tonik and J. R. Logan. While Short Code represented expressions, the representation itself was not direct and required a process ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Tony Brooker
Ralph Anthony Brooker (22 September 1925 – 20 November 2019), was a British computer scientist known for developing the Mark 1 Autocode. He was educated at Emanuel School and graduated in Mathematics from Imperial College in 1945 and returned there in 1947 as assistant lecturer. His first computer project was the construction of a fast multiplier unit from electro-mechanical relays. This was taken over by Sid Michaelson and K. D. Tocher and incorporated into ICCE, the Imperial College Computing Engine based on the same technology. By then (1949)Brooker had moved to the University of Cambridge Computer Laboratory to work for Maurice Wilkes on software development for EDSAC. In October 1951 Brooker joined the Computing Machine Laboratory at Manchester University, where he took over from Alan Turing the task of writing programming manuals and running a user service on the Ferranti Mark 1 computer. It was his experience with the rather tedious Manchester machine-coding co ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Manchester Mark 1
The Manchester Mark 1 was one of the earliest stored-program computers, developed at the Victoria University of Manchester, England from the Manchester Baby (operational in June 1948). Work began in August 1948, and the first version was operational by April 1949; a program written to search for Mersenne primes ran error-free for nine hours on the night of 16/17 June 1949. The machine's successful operation was widely reported in the British press, which used the phrase "electronic brain" in describing it to their readers. That description provoked a reaction from the head of the University of Manchester's Department of Neurosurgery, the start of a long-running debate as to whether an electronic computer could ever be truly creative. The Mark 1 was to provide a computing resource within the university, to allow researchers to gain experience in the practical use of computers, but it very quickly also became a prototype on which the design of Ferranti's commercial version coul ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
John Backus
John Warner Backus (December 3, 1924 – March 17, 2007) was an American computer scientist. He led the team that invented and implemented FORTRAN, the first widely used high-level programming language, and was the inventor of the Backus–Naur form (BNF), a widely used notation to define syntaxes of formal languages. He later did research into the function-level programming paradigm, presenting his findings in his influential 1977 Turing Award lecture "Can Programming Be Liberated from the von Neumann Style?" The IEEE awarded Backus the W. W. McDowell Award in 1967 for the development of FORTRAN. He received the National Medal of Science in 1975 and the 1977 Turing Award "for profound, influential, and lasting contributions to the design of practical high-level programming systems, notably through his work on FORTRAN, and for publication of formal procedures for the specification of programming languages". John Backus retired in 1991. He died at his home in Ashland, Oregon ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Laning And Zierler System
The Laning and Zierler system (sometimes called "George" by its users) was the first operating algebraic compiler, that is, a system capable of accepting mathematical formulas in algebraic notation and producing equivalent machine code (the term compiler had not yet been invented and the system was referred to as "an interpretive program"). It was implemented in 1952 for the MIT WHIRLWIND by J. Halcombe Laning and Neal Zierler. It is preceded by non-algebraic compilers such as the A-0 System on UNIVAC I . Description The system accepted formulas in a more or less algebraic notation. It respected the standard rules for operator precedence, allowed nested parentheses, and used superscripts to indicate exponents. It was among the first programming systems to allow symbolic variable names and allocate storage automatically. The system also automated the following tasks: floating point computation, linkage to subroutines for the basic functions of analysis (sine, etc.) and printi ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Grace Hopper
Grace Brewster Hopper (; December 9, 1906 – January 1, 1992) was an American computer scientist, mathematician, and United States Navy rear admiral. She was a pioneer of computer programming. Hopper was the first to devise the theory of machine-independent programming languages, and used this theory to develop the FLOW-MATIC programming language and COBOL, an early high-level programming language still in use today. She was also one of the first programmers on the Harvard Mark I computer. She is credited with writing the first computer manual, "A Manual of Operation for the Automatic Sequence Controlled Calculator." Before joining the Navy, Hopper earned a Ph.D. in both mathematics and mathematical physics from Yale University and was a professor of mathematics at Vassar College. She left her position at Vassar to join the United States Navy Reserve during World War II. Hopper began her computing career in 1944 as a member of the Harvard Mark I team, led by Howard H. Aiken. ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
A-0 System
The A-0 system (''Arithmetic Language version 0'') was an early compiler related tool developed for electronic computers, written by Grace Murray Hopper in 1951 and 1952 originally for the UNIVAC I. The A-0 functioned more as a loader or linker than the modern notion of a compiler. A program was specified as a sequence of subroutines and its arguments. The subroutines were identified by a numeric code and the arguments to the subroutines were written directly after each subroutine code. The A-0 system converted the specification into machine code that could be fed into the computer a second time to execute the said program. The A-0 system was followed by the A-1, A-2, A-3 (released as ARITH-MATIC), AT-3 (released as MATH-MATIC), and B-0 (released as FLOW-MATIC). The A-2 system was developed at the UNIVAC division of Remington Rand in 1953 and released to customers by the end of that year. Customers were provided the source code for A-2 and invited to send their improvements ba ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Alick Glennie
Alick Edwards Glennie (1925–2003) was a British computer scientist, most famous for having developed Autocode, which influential computer scientist Donald Knuth regarded as the first ever computer compiler.Knuth, Donald E.; Pardo, Luis Trabb, "Early development of programming languages", Encyclopedia of Computer Science and Technology (Marcel Dekker) 7: 419–493 Glennie worked with Alan Turing Alan Mathison Turing (; 23 June 1912 – 7 June 1954) was an English mathematician, computer scientist, logician, cryptanalyst, philosopher and theoretical biologist. He was highly influential in the development of theoretical computer ... on several projects, including the Manchester Mark 1. Glennie subsequently worked at Atomic Weapons Research Establishment (AWRE) where he was responsible in the early 1960s in developing FORTRAN compilers for several large computers inc. IBM 709, IBM 7090, IBM 7030 ("Stretch") and also ICT Atlas. He pioneered a method of developing t ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Autocode
Autocode is the name of a family of "simplified coding systems", later called programming languages, devised in the 1950s and 1960s for a series of digital computers at the Universities of Manchester, Cambridge and London. Autocode was a generic term; the autocodes for different machines were not necessarily closely related as are, for example, the different versions of the single language Fortran. Today the term is used to refer to the family of early languages descended from the Manchester Mark 1 autocoder systems, which were generally similar. In the 1960s, the term autocoders was used more generically as to refer to any high-level programming language using a compiler. Examples of languages referred to as autocodes are COBOL and Fortran. Glennie's Autocode The first autocode and its compiler were developed by Alick Glennie in 1952 for the Mark 1 computer at the University of Manchester and is considered by some to be the first compiled programming language. His main ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
Corrado Böhm
Corrado Böhm (17 January 1923 – 23 October 2017) was an Italian computer scientist and Professor Emeritus at the Sapienza University of Rome, University of Rome "La Sapienza", known especially for his contributions to the theory of structured programming, constructive mathematics, combinatory logic, lambda calculus, and the semantics and implementation of functional programming languages. Work In his PhD dissertation (in Mathematics, at ETH Zurich, 1951; published in 1954), Böhm describes for the first time a full Böhm's language, meta-circular compiler, that is a translation mechanism of a programming language, written in that same language. His most influential contribution is the so-called structured program theorem, published in 1966 together with Giuseppe Jacopini. Together with Alessandro Berarducci, he demonstrated an isomorphism between the strictly-positive algebraic data types and the polymorphic lambda-terms, otherwise known as Böhm–Berarducci encoding. In the ... [...More Info...] [...Related Items...] OR: [Wikipedia] [Google] [Baidu] |
