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AIList Digest Volume 2 Issue 159
AIList Digest Thursday, 22 Nov 1984 Volume 2 : Issue 159
Today's Topics:
Algorithms - Interlisp-D "malgorithm?",
Programming Style - IBM Compiler Message,
Machine Translation - Simplistic Beginnings,
Books - Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution,
Research Styles - B.F. Skinner,
Reasoning about Structure and Function - SIGART Special Issue,
Conference - Hardware Description Languages
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Date: Sun 18 Nov 84 13:55:58-PST
From: Jay Ferguson <FERGUSON@SUMEX-AIM.ARPA>
Subject: Interlisp-D "malgorithm?"
Another point on this classic example of a true malgorithm is that
there is a lack of understanding of implementation detail. The
CLISP feature of Interlisp is translated into a MAP function or a
PROG depending upon the structure. Each time you call a FOR statement
interpetively the translation occurs. When you compile the FOR
statement you will see large gains in efficiency.
I ran several test of both LDIFF, the initial FOR, and JonL's FOR with
the following results:
interpreted compiled
LDIFF .00125 secs .00125 secs
Todd - FOR .02125 secs .00444 secs
JonL - FOR .02114 secs .00115 secs
These were run under INTERLISP-10 on a DEC-2060 with a 26 element list,
taking the first 9 elements. Each test was run 100 times. LDIFF was
not actually compiled because it was a normal function call.
jay
------------------------------
Date: Sun, 18 Nov 84 15:50:57 PST
From: Steve Crocker <crocker@AEROSPACE>
Subject: IBM compiler message rebuttal
At the risk of being misunderstood as an apologist for IBM's ultra prosaic
programming systems, I feel Earl Boebert's Nov 16 item on IBM's Fortran
compiler error message, viz. "COLUMN cc OF CARD nnnn CONTAINS A 12-4 PUNCH
MINUS SIGN INSTEAD OF AN 11 PUNCH MINUS SIGN. CORRECT AND RESUBMIT.", is
taken out of context and misrepresents the situation.
First, a slight diversion. I believe a 12-4 code is a D, and Earl probably
meant the 11-8-4 code, although my memory is a bit rusty and I surely have
not saved my old IBM BCD crib sheets.
The real issue is there had been two legal codes for minus, 11-8-4 and 11.
A decision had been made to phase out the 11-8-4 so it could be reassigned
to another symbol, and it eventually became the apostrophe, I believe.
Conversion proceeded in phases. At the end of the conversion, the 11-8-4
code would always be treated as an apostrophe and receive no more special
attention if it were detected in an inappropriate position than any other
character would. For example, "A = B'C" and "A = B$C" would get the same
treatment, and inhibit completion of the compilation. (Admittedly, other
strategies for dealing with errors are possible, e.g. the DWIM system in
Interlisp, but that would mean a COMPLETE overhaul of the Fortran compiler,
and Fortran wasn't designed for either heuristic error correction or
interactive repair.)
To get to the point where 11-8-4 was freed up from its interpretation as a
minus sign, users were informed of the change and "encouraged" to amend
their programs. The messages during the initial period were just warning
messages. Later they were hard errors, as Earl related. One might object
to this, but it's not simple to see what else to do. If the 11-8-4 were to
take on a new meaning and still be accepted as a minus sign in all contexts
that minus signs are legal, both ambiguity and outright misunderstandings
would be propagated. Despite the apparent inflexibility of the compiler, I
doubt this kind of error message caused any large disruption in programmer
productivity.
The problem was not unique to IBM's character set, of course. The meaning
of the ASCII code for "_" was changed a few years ago. It used to mean a
left arrow and some languages used it for assignment; now it means an
underscore and is used within identifiers. This conversion was not without
some pain...
More seriously, the problem of catching all the dependencies of some change
to an established interface remains a challenge. This may be a more frutiful
topic for discussion than malgorithms.
------------------------------
Date: Mon, 19 Nov 84 13:54 CST
From: Boebert@HI-MULTICS.ARPA
Subject: re: IBM compiler message rebuttal
Just when you think of a good cheap shot, somebody goes and makes it
sound like it was a reasonable thing to do...in any event, we were
undergrads and very much on the Algol side of the Algol/FORTRAN dispute,
and we thought the message a wonderful example of IBM mindlessness.
Maybe they should have appended THIS FATAL ERROR BROUGHT TO YOU IN THE
INTERESTS OF THE GREATER GOOD.
------------------------------
Date: Tue 20 Nov 84 22:47:28-EST
From: Michael Rubin <RUBIN@COLUMBIA-20.ARPA>
Subject: Re: computers speaking German
I've seen a paper from the very early sixties that described a French
preprocessor for FORTRAN -- it converted ALLER to GOTO, FAIRE to DO,
etcetera.... The paper claimed this was a first step toward machine
translation (of natural language).
------------------------------
Date: Mon 19 Nov 84 05:55:27-CST
From: Clive Dawson <CC.Clive@UTEXAS-20.ARPA>
Subject: Re: book"Hackers: heroes of the computer revolution"
[Forwarded from the UTexas-20 bboard by Laws@SRI-AI.]
I picked up Steven Levy's "Hackers" today and have gotten through Part 1:
"True Hackers--Cambridge: the Fifties and Sixties". All in all quite
enjoyable and well worth the money, though I did have to grit my teeth when
reading about the "TICO" text editor and the "MULTIX" and "TENNIX"
operating systems. Sigh. The book comes mostly from over a hundred
personal interviews conducted in 1982-83. Levy seems to have done a
careful job of documenting the written sources and of compiling an index.
Those who were interviewed will have to be the ones to say how faithfully
their perspective was communicated. Most of the stories in Part 1 have
become part of standard "hacker folklore" which has been passed from mouth
to mouth and keyboard to keyboard over the last 25 years. It's nice to
have them all collected in one place now.
I certainly wouldn't rate Steven Levy's writing in the same class as Tom
Wolfe's, but I must admit that the the way the image of Cambridge is
painted as the birthplace of hacking was strikingly reminiscent of how
Wolfe built the image of the high desert in California as the birthplace of
the Right Stuff. Levy even sprinkles references to "The Right Thing"
throughout the text. (As we all know, Wolfe came up with his title after
seeing this term in the Jargon file. :-))
I cheated and temporarily skipped over Part 2 ("Hardware Hackers") and
Part 3 ("Game Hackers") to the Epilogue--"The Last of the True Hackers".
The material covered here (e.g. the birth of Symbolics & LMI) is more
contemporary and thus familiar to many of us. It is, sadly, pretty much
on the mark.
I too would be interested in hearing other opinions of this book
(especially from any of those interviewed.)
Clive
------------------------------
Date: 19 Nov 84 09:48 PST
From: JonL.pa@XEROX.ARPA
Subject: B.F. Skinner: A Man for All Reasonings
Shrager's conveyance of the quote about Skinner being an "expert systems
researcher" highlights a fundamental split in the AI community.
First, let me say I don't regard expert systems as a panacea -- at worst
they could be viewed as a technological spin-off of 20 years of AI
research. Contrast this with the view taken by Skinner and his
disciples about SR being a fully adequate model of psychology; the
appearance of his book Verbal Behaviour is a desperate attempt to shore
up this claim.
On the other hand, a certain faction of AI is also trying to find a
fully adequate model of human cognitive capabilities (I would place
Minsky as the arch-defender of this "faith" -- the mind-as-meat-computer
camp); possibly *some* AI people would think that a brute force approach
along the lines of expert systems would be an interesting model, but I
don't personally know any such. Another faction is less concerned with
mimicing the human structures and more concerned with the "artificial"
aspects of intelligence; I tend, now, to think of John McCarthy as the
prototype of this camp (see his article in Psychology Today earlier this
year -- perhaps April? -- and don't be put off by the fact that it
appears in, glaaag, Psychology Today).
The second approach is *not* to be confused with expert systems.
Although, one could imagine why "expert systems" would receive a more
favorable review from the latter camp than from the former.
I was present at MIT in late 1971 when the "MathLab" group was "read
out" of the AI community (the "MathLab" group at MIT quickly then became
MACSYMA). Although MacSyma was certainly among the first of Expert
Systems with a major impact, it wasn't "AI" by the prevailing standards;
perhaps more like engineering, but not "AI". What must be emphasized,
however, is that no one, at any time, thought of MacSyma as even a
partial model of human cognition.
If Skinner were coming of age now, with the same mind set, and were
indeed an expert systems researcher -- don't you think he'd have a more
"ambitious" goal?
-- JonL White --
------------------------------
Date: 18 Nov 1984 17:32-EST
From: milne <milne@wpafb-afita>
Subject: SIGART on Reasoning about Structure and Function
Special Issue of SIGART News on Reasoning about Structure and Function.
We plan to edit a special issue of SIGART News devoted to representing,
and reasoning about, structure, behavior and function of devices and
systems. This has recently become a topic of increasing importance
in giving expert systems capabilities for causal reasoning to support
diagnostic and other tasks. Work in this area has been in the domains
of simple machines, electronic circuits, mechanical systems and medicine.
Our aim is to cover the spectrum of work that is going on in the U. S
and other countries in this general area. We expect that the SIGART News
special issue will be followed by a special issue of some appropriate
journal containing fuller version of selected papers from the former.
Submissions are invited from researchers summarizing their approach,
results, problems and plans. The submissions should be under
5 type-written pages, and should be sent to Prof. Rob Milne at the address
below. The deadline for submissions is 15 January 1985.
Rob Milne B. Chandrasekaran
Department of Electrical Enginnering Department of Computer & Information
AFIT/ENG Science
A.F. Institute of Technology The Ohio State University
WPAFB, OH 45433 Columbus, OH 43210
513-255-3576 614-422-0923
milne@wpafb-afita
------------------------------
Date: Saturday, 17 November 1984 20:35:17 EST
From: Mario.Barbacci@cmu-cs-spice.arpa
Subject: Conference - Hardware Description Languages
CALL FOR PAPERS
7TH INTERNATIONAL SYMPOSIUM ON
COMPUTER HARDWARE DESCRIPTION LANGUAGES
AND THEIR APPLICATIONS
CHDL-85
AUGUST 29-31, 1985
KEIDANREN BUILDING
TOKYO, JAPAN
Sponsored by the International Federation for Information Processing (IFIP) and
the Information Processing Society of Japan (IPSJ), organized by IFIP TC-10 and
IFIP WG 10.2, in cooperation with IEEE-CS, ACM, GI, and NTG.
The theme of the symposium is:
TOOL, METHOD, AND LANGUAGE INTEGRATION
The Symposium focuses on the design process as a whole. The objective is to
cover the various aspects of (computer-supported) specification, verification,
modelling, evaluation, and design of computer systems based on suitable design
languages. Integration can be considered from specification to implementation
as well as in terms of language and tool integration at a given level.
Topic areas are:
>From Specification to Implementation of Digital Systems:
methodological aspects integrating levels of description
formal verification and performance and reliability
correctness evaluation
test generation from CHDL synthesis
descriptions
Computer System/Hardware Description Languages:
formal specification languages languages and technology
multiple representation of language support for verification,
design objects performance, and reliability
Tool Integration:
design environments expert systems for system design
data structures for integration integration of tools for testing,
between levels and tools verification, and simulation
Acceptance and Experience:
reality in industry acceptance problems of new methods,
integration with CAD/CAM languages and tools
Five (5) copies of the full length manuscript in English, not exceeding 20
double-spaced typewritten pages, should be sent to the Program Chairman to
arrive no later than December 15, 1984.
Notification of acceptance is planned for March 15, 1985. The final
camera-ready version of accepted papers is due on May 15, 1985.
Because the symposium is held immediately after the VLSI 85 conference at the
same location, Program Committees of both conferences may transfer papers which
fit better the topics of the other conference.
General Chairman: Program Chairman:
Professor Tohru Moto-oka Dr. Cees Jan Koomen
Department of Electrical Engineering Philips International
University of Tokyo Product Development Coordination
Hongo, 7 chome VO-1, P.O. Box 218
Bunkyo-ku 5600 MD Eindhoven,
Tokyo, Japan The Netherlands
telephone (212) 2111 ext. 6652 telephone (31) (40) 884962
ArpaNet: Philips@sri-csl
Local Committee Chairman: IFIP WG 10.2 Chairman:
Dr.Takao Uehara Dr. Mario R. Barbacci
Tools and Methodology Section Department of Computer Science
Software Laboratory Carnegie-Mellon University
Fujitsu Laboratories Ltd. Pittsburgh
1015 Kamikodanaka Nakahara-ku Pennsylvania 15213
Kawasaki 211, Japan USA
telephone (81) (44) 777 1111 X6155 telephone (412) 578-2578
telex 3842 122
Local Committee:
H. Ando (publicity), Y. Ikemoto (local arrangements), O. Karatsu (finance),
T. Uehara (Chairman)
Program Committee:
M. Barbacci (USA), D. Borrione (France), S. Crocker (USA), J. Darringer (USA),
S. Dasgupta (USA), R. Hartenstein (FRG), E. Hoerbst (FRG), J. Jess
(Netherlands), C.J. Koomen (Netherlands, Chairman), F. Rammig (FRG),
W. Sherwood (USA), T. Sudo (Japan), T. Uehara (Japan), M. Vernon (USA),
A. Yamada (Japan)
------------------------------
End of AIList Digest
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