Rating the major computing periodicals on readability
The readability of the ten major computing periodicals is analyzed using the Flesch Reading Ease Index.
Software Engineering and Programming Languages
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User-oriented criteria for the selection of DSS software
Both the composition of the selection team and the choice of evaluation criteria should reflect the end-user orientation of DSS software.
From programming language design to computer construction
From NELIAC (via ALGOL 60) to Euler and ALGOL W, to Pascal and Modula-2, and ultimately Lilith, Wirth's search for an appropriate formalism for systems programming yields intriguing insights and surprising results.
Grosch’s law re-revisited: CPU power and the cost of computation
Does Grosch's law, which postulated that the costs of computer systems increase at a rate equivalent to the square root of their power, still hold? The age of mini-, micro-, and supercomputers seems to have complicated the situation. When computers are grouped according to their size and power, Grosch's law seems to hold within each group, but not between different groups.
Amortized efficiency of list update and paging rules
In this article we study the amortized efficiency of the “move-to-front” and similar rules for dynamically maintaining a linear list. Under the assumption that accessing the ith element from the front of the list takes &thgr;(i) time, we show that move-to-front is within a constant factor of optimum among a wide class of list maintenance rules. Other natural heuristics, such as the transpose and frequency count rules, do not share this property. We generalize our results to show that move-to-front is within a constant factor of optimum as long as the access cost is a convex function. We also study paging, a setting in which the access cost is not convex. The paging rule corresponding to move-to-front is the “least recently used” (LRU) replacement rule. We analyze the amortized complexity of LRU, showing that its efficiency differs from that of the off-line paging rule (Belady's MIN algorithm) by a factor that depends on the size of fast memory. No on-line paging algorithm has better amortized performance.
The Manchester prototype dataflow computer
The Manchester project has developed a powerful dataflow processor based on dynamic tagging. This processor is large enough to tackle realistic applications and exhibits impressive speedup for programs with sufficient parallelism.
Sixty-four small computers are connected by a network of point-to-point communication channels in the plan of a binary 6-cube. This “Cosmic Cube” computer is a hardware simulation of a future VLSI implementation that will consist of single-chip nodes. The machine offers high degrees of concurrency in applications and suggests that future machines with thousands of nodes are both feasible and attractive.
A style analysis of C programs
A large quantity of well-respected software is tested against a series of metrics designed to measure program lucidity, with intriguing results. Although slanted toward software written in the C language, the measures are adaptable for analyzing most high-level languages.
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