Exploring the N-th Dimension of Language

This paper is aimed at exploring the hidden fundamental\ud computational property of natural language that has been so elusive that it has made all attempts to characterize its real computational property ultimately fail. Earlier natural language was thought to be context-free. However, it was gradually realized that this does not hold much water given that a range of natural language phenomena have been found as being of non-context-free character that they have almost scuttled plans to brand natural language contextfree. So it has been suggested that natural language is mildly context-sensitive and to some extent context-free. In all, it seems that the issue over the exact computational property has not yet been solved. Against this background it will be proposed that this exact computational property of natural language is perhaps the N-th dimension of language, if what we mean by dimension is\ud nothing but universal (computational) property of natural language

Studies related to the process of program development

The submitted work consists of a collection of publications arising from research carried out at Rhodes University (1970-1980) and at Heriot-Watt University (1980-1992). The theme of this research is the process of program development, i.e. the process of creating a computer program to solve some particular problem. The papers presented cover a number of different topics which relate to this process, viz. (a) Programming methodology programming. (b) Properties of programming languages. aspects of structured. (c) Formal specification of programming languages. (d) Compiler techniques. (e) Declarative programming languages. (f) Program development aids. (g) Automatic program generation. (h) Databases. (i) Algorithms and applications

Foundations of secure computation

Issued as Workshop proceedings and Final report, Project no. G-36-61

Weighted deductive parsing and Knuth's algorithm

We discuss weighted deductive parsing and consider the problem of finding the derivation with the lowest weight. We show that Knuth's generalization of Dijkstra's algorithm for the shortest-path problem offers a general method to solve this problem. Our approach is modular in the sense that Knuth's algorithm is formulated independently from the weighted deduction system