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From: eachus@spectre.mitre.org (Robert I. Eachus)
Subject: Re: Any research putting c above ada?
Date: 1997/05/08
Message-ID: <EACHUS.97May8175618@spectre.mitre.org>#1/1
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Newsgroups: comp.lang.c++,comp.lang.c,comp.lang.ada
Date: 1997-05-08T00:00:00+00:00
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In article <5kpgfu$ju4@uni.library.ucla.edu> jmartin@cs.ucla.edu (Jay Martin) writes:

  > Interesting, but come to think about it where are the recognized
  > "masterworks" of software?  

   Would you like me to start a list?  Hmmm.  (Most names omitted, to
make it sort of a test.  Can you put names to these papers, books, or
products?  For Early's and Strassen's algorithms, what it does and how
fast gets full credit, I'll give you the authors as a freebie.)

   Quicksort  (AFIAK, the first masterwork in software, certainly
               recognized as such at the time.)
   Heapsort   (A few months later, and also recognized as such.)

   The PDP-1 symbolic assembler.  (The final version was written as an
self assembling macro, and ran about four columns in the manual,
excluding tables.  The PDP-6 and later PDP-10 macro assemblers were
actually bootstrapped using the PDP-1 assembler with different
tables.)

   The paper on THE operating system.  (Extra points if you can spell
the name of the school and the authors without looking them up.)

   A Discipline of Programming.

   The Revised report on Algol 60.

   Unix curses.

   Elisa.

   Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance (and I don't think the
word software appears anywhere in the book.)

   Early's Algorithm.
 
   Strassen's Algorithm.

   Emacs  (Gosling?  Gnu?  Multics?  All of the above? For that matter:)

   Multics.

   On the decomposition of software into modules.

   TeX (and later LaTeX).

   The Florida algorithm for resolving overloading in Ada.

   The CORDIC algorithm.

   Several factoring algorithms, including P-1, Number Field Sieve,
and all of the Quadratic Sieve variations.

   I considered and eliminated a few others as out of domain: Euclid's
algorithm, the Simplex algorithm for solving linear programming
problems, the fast Fourier transform, the ChirpZ transform, and all
the work on NP completeness.  They were all originally considered to
be applied or theoretical mathematics...
--

					Robert I. Eachus

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