1957-2007: 50 Years of Higher Order Programming Languages

Fifty years ago one of the greatest breakthroughs in computer programming and in the history of computers happened – the appearance of FORTRAN, the first higher-order programming language. From that time until now hundreds of programming languages were invented, different programming paradigms were defined, all with the main goal to make computer programming easier and closer to as many people as possible. Many battles were fought among scientists as well as among developers around concepts of programming, programming languages and paradigms. It can be said that programming paradigms and programming languages were very often a trigger for many changes and improvements in computer science as well as in computer industry. Definitely, computer programming is one of the cornerstones of computer science. Today there are many tools that give a help in the process of programming, but there is still a programming tasks that can be solved only manually. Therefore, programming is still one of the most creative parts of interaction with computers. Programmers should chose programming language in accordance to task they have to solve, but very often, they chose it in accordance to their personal preferences, their beliefs and many other subjective reasons. Nevertheless, the market of programming languages can be merciless to languages as history was merciless to some people, even whole nations. Programming languages and developers get born, live and die leaving more or less tracks and successors, and not always the best survives. The history of programming languages is closely connected to the history of computers and computer science itself. Every single thing from one of them has its reflexions onto the other. This paper gives a short overview of last fifty years of computer programming and computer programming languages, but also gives many ideas that influenced other aspects of computer science. Particularly, programming paradigms are described, their intentions and goals, as well as the most of the significant languages of all paradigms

Automation of garment assembly processes

Robotic automation in apparel manufacturing is reviewed and investigated. Gripper design for separation and de-stacking of batch cut fabric components is identified as an important factor in implementing such automation and a study of existing gripper mechanisms is presented. New de-stacking gripper designs and processes are described together with experimental results. Single fabric component handling, alignment and registration techniques are investigated. Some of these techniques are integrated within a demonstrator robotic garment assembly cell automating the common edge binding process. Performance results are reported

National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA)/American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE) summer faculty fellowship program, 1986, volume 2

The Johnson Space Center (JSC) NASA/ASEE Summer Faculty Fellowship Program was conducted by the University of Houston and JSC. The ten week program was operated under the auspices of the American Society for Engineering Education (ASEE). The basic objectives of the program are (1) to further the professional knowledge of qualified engineering and science faculty members; (2) to stimulate an exchange of ideas between participants and NASA; (3) to enrich and refresh the research and teaching activities of participants' institutions; and (4) to contribute to the research objectives of the NASA Centers. Each faculty fellow spent ten weeks at JSC engaged in a research project commensurate with his interests and background and worked in collaboration with a NASA/JSC colleague. The final reports on the research projects are presented. This volume, 2, contains sections 15 through 30

Prototype Management Support System: Design, Implementation, and Empirical Testing of a Natural Language-Like Knowledge-Based Interface Between an End User and a Statistical Problem Processing Package for Microcomputers

Business Administratio

Early Nordic compilers and autocodes

Abstract. The early development of compilers for high-level program-ming languages, and of so-called autocoding systems, is well documented at the international level but not as regards the Nordic countries. The goal of this paper is to provide a survey of compiler and autocode development in the Nordic countries in the early years, roughly 1953 to 1965, and to relate it to international developments. We also touch on some of the historical societal context

Turbo Pascal implementation of a distributed processing network of MS-DOS microcomputers connected in a master-slave configuration

This thesis describes the design and implementation of a distributed processing network of IBM PC compatible computers capable of performing parallel processing tasks. The network is a star cluster local area network, with the central computer controlling the operations of the satellite computers on a sequential basis. The local area network software operates over the computer's standard RS-232C communications ports, and is currently implemented to allow the central computer to operate two satellite computers. Processing tasks are dispatched to the satellite computers as programs which run to completion on the satellite computers. Utility programs within the software include file and message transfer to start the programs on the satellite computers and to obtain the output of the remotely executed program, configuration utilities to set the communications port parameters, and windowing utilities for display of information normally presented on the remote computer's display. The program is implemented in Turbo Pascal 4.0 under the MS-DOS operating system, version 3.21.http://archive.org/details/turbopascalimple00ardnApproved for public release; distribution is unlimited

Teaching lower level computer science courses via virtual classroom and video : course reports by faculty

New Jersey Institute of Technology is the grateful recipient of a generous grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation which has enabled it to explore the use of asynchronous learning networks to create and deliver an entire undergraduate degree program in computer and information science. Each of these courses uses some amount of lecture-type material delivered via videotape. These materials are usually available to students in three different ways: by viewing broadcasts on a New Jersey cable station, by renting the set of videotapes, or by viewing in a special room in the library. Videotapes for distance learning are not new and are not, in themselves, a very effective means of delivery. The innovative part of this project is the Virtual Classroom™ which is a specially tailored set of features embedded in New Jersey Institute of Technology\u27s computer conferencing system, EIES (Electronic Information Exchange System). This makes possible a rich interchange and collaboration among students and faculty as they discuss and work through the problems and concepts in a course. As of the spring of 1995, both the B.A.I.S and the B.S.C.S. are available to distance and oncampus students. Teaching in a Virtual Classroom mixed with other media (such as video or CD ROM) is not simple however. The purpose of the enclosed descriptions of experiences by faculty members is to familiarize prospective teachers using this media mix in the future with both some ideas for how to organize their online activities, and knowledge of problems that have been encountered. The faculty members were given a suggested outline of topics to include in their reports, but otherwise were free to include whatever they thought would be of most use to other faculty members in the future, teaching the same or similar courses. Those who are interested in learning more about teaching and learning in ALN environments are referred to two book-length treatments: Starr Roxanne Hiltz, The Virtual Classroom: Learning Without Limits via Computer Networks (Ablex, Norwood NJ, 1994); and Linda Harasim, Starr Roxanne Hiltz, Lucio Teles and Murray Turoff, Learning Networks: A Field Guide to Teaching and Learning Online (MIT Press, 1995

Parallelisation of algorithms

Most numerical software involves performing an extremely large volume of algebraic computations. This is both costly and time consuming in respect of computer resources and, for large problems, often super-computer power is required in order for results to be obtained in a reasonable amount of time. One method whereby both the cost and time can be reduced is to use the principle "Many hands make light work", or rather, allow several computers to operate simultaneously on the code, working towards a common goal, and hopefully obtaining the required results in a fraction of the time and cost normally used. This can be achieved through the modification of the costly, time consuming code, breaking it up into separate individual code segments which may be executed concurrently on different processors. This is termed parallelisation of code. This document describes communication between sequential processes, protocols, message routing and parallelisation of algorithms. In particular, it deals with these aspects with reference to the Transputer as developed by INMOS and includes two parallelisation examples, namely parallelisation of code to study airflow and of code to determine far field patterns of antennas. This document also reports on the practical experiences with programming in parallel

An overview of decision table literature 1982-1995.

This report gives an overview of the literature on decision tables over the past 15 years. As much as possible, for each reference, an author supplied abstract, a number of keywords and a classification are provided. In some cases own comments are added. The purpose of these comments is to show where, how and why decision tables are used. The literature is classified according to application area, theoretical versus practical character, year of publication, country or origin (not necessarily country of publication) and the language of the document. After a description of the scope of the interview, classification results and the classification by topic are presented. The main body of the paper is the ordered list of publications with abstract, classification and comments.