A quantitative charcterization of control flow context: software measures for programming environments

A review of published measures of control flow complexity in programs reveals three major deficiencies: loss of information, lack of specificity, and lack of analytical support. A new approach is used to characterize the control structure of a program, with the aim of defining properties and measures of control flow that can be of immediate use to programmers, regardless of their utility as complexity measures. Mathematical rigor and analytical evaluation techniques are used to define a set of properties of control structure and a corresponding vector of measures. Instead of defining the properties and measures for an entire flowgraph, they are defined at the node level, reflecting the control flow surrounding each node in a flowgraph. The properties and their measures reflect the following characteristics of control flow: nesting, iteration, structuredness, and predecessors. Algorithms for computing the properties and their measures are presented. An assessment of the computational complexity of the algorithms shows that they are feasible programming environment tools;A finite path set, representing all possible execution sequences, is evaluated as a characterizing property. Desired characteristics of the path set are defined and used to evaluate four published path subset criteria. Those criteria are shown to be deficient, so a fifth criterion is defined. However, the path set satisfying this fifth criterion is shown to be too large to be of practical use to a programmer

The design and implementation of the programming language Natural

This paper reports progress on the development of the programming language Natural, currently under design by Dr. Thomas J. Sager at the University of Missouri--Rolla. Natural is a very high-level language with a mathematical flavor, and includes several concepts relatively uncommon in programming language design. The text also discusses an implementation on the IBM Personal Computer of Mini-Natural, a subset of Natural, and presents examples of programs written in Mini-Natural --Abstract, page ii

Software development tools: A bibliography, appendix C.

A bibliography containing approximately 200 citations on tools which help software developers perform some development task (such as text manipulation, testing, etc.), and which would not necessarily be found as part of a computing facility is given. The bibliography comes from a relatively random sampling of the literature and is not complete. But it is indicative of the nature and range of tools currently being prepared or currently available

Proceedings of the 1968 Summer Institute on Symbolic Mathematical Computation

Investigating symbolic mathematical computation using PL/1 FORMAC batch system and Scope FORMAC interactive syste

Towards an Intelligent Debugging System for Pascal Programs: On the Theory and Algorithms of Plan Recognition in Rich's Plan Calculus

This thesis presents work in progress on building an intelligent general purpose, domain-free debugging system for Pascal programs. This system (IDS) is based on Rich’s surface plan/plan calculus graph formalisms, and this thesis develops theory and algorithms for performing program understanding within this framework. This thesis is in three parts, the first part describes why an ability to do both plan recognition and general purpose reasoning is essential for debugging programs. The second part of this thesis describes the plan calculus and shows how it offers the ability to combine both general purpose reasoning, and (graph-based) plan recognition. It then goes on to present a new polynomial time algorithm (a generalisation of traditional chart parsing for string grammars) for doing bottom-up, or top-down, analysis of surface plans. This algorithm is presented in the framework of restricted structure sharing flow graph grammars developed for this purpose. To justify the use of such grammars this part of the thesis develops the theory of deterministic operations in the plan calculus, and also develops the theory of generalised control flow environments to justify the way control flow information is handled. The final part gives an overview of IDS, and modifies the above algorithm to cope with various parts of the plan calculus that do not exactly fit into the framework we have developed. Thus this thesis gives a complete account of how to perform plan recognition in Rich’s framework. This part of the thesis also describes the translation process from Pascal to surface plans, and presents a technique for translating plans expressed in Rich’s notation, into suitable rules for the parser to use. Finally it presents some preliminary work on exactly how a debugging system using these techniques might go about locating and fixing bugs in programs

Tuning pipelined scientific data analyses for efficient multicore execution

Scientific data analyses often apply a pipelined sequence of computational tasks to independent datasets. Each task in the pipeline captures and processes a dataset element, may be dependent on other tasks in the pipeline, may have a different computational complexity and may be filtered out from progressing in the pipeline. The goal of this work is to develop an efficient scheduler that automatically (i) manages a parallel data reading and an adequate data structure creation, (ii) adaptively defines the most efficient order of pipeline execution of the tasks, considering their inter-dependence and both the filtering out rate and the computational weight, and (iii) manages the parallel execution of the computational tasks in a multicore system, applied to the same or to different dataset elements. A real case study data analysis application from High Energy Physics (HEP) was used to validate the efficiency of this scheduler. Preliminary results show an impressive performance improvement of the pipeline tuning when compared to the original sequential HEP code (up to a 35x speedup in a dual 12-core system), and also show significant performance speedups over conventional parallelization approaches of this case study application (up to 10x faster in the same system).Project Search-ON2 (NORTE-07-0162- FEDER-000086), co-funded by the North Portugal Regional Operational Programme (ON.2 - O Novo Norte), under the National Strategic Reference Framework, through the European Regional Development Fund

An interactive programming system for media computation

Thesis (M.S.)--Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Dept. of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, 1994.Includes bibliographical references (p. 103-106).by David James Wetherall.M.S