Combo: A General-Purpose Program for Searching, Annotating, Encoding-Decoding, and Reformatting Data Files (Classic Reprint) - Hardcover

Robert McClenon

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 026585959X ISBN 13: 9780265859599

Publisher: Forgotten Books, 2018

Synopsis

Excerpt from Combo: A General-Purpose Program for Searching, Annotating, Encoding-Decoding, and Reformatting Data Files

It is our view that many application programmers' and systems analysts' views on program efficiency are unduly colored by early experience with primitive compilers and computer systems. As computers have become faster and as core have grown larger and cheaper, over-all man machine efficiency considerations often outweigh consideration of Optimum machine use. While these classical concerns are still important for long repetitive computer runs or for processing large files, they are really not important for a large fraction of the day to day Operations on a modern computer. Moreover, we have found that, for nonnumerical applications, on the whole, a special-purpose program written to solve a specific problem will be no simpler than a general-purpose program capable Of solving it and many other related although not identical problems.

General-purpose programming is greatly facilitated by the use of subroutines of modular design. This resembles the construction Of a house from prefabricated parts. Just as certain kinds of wall or flooring components are common to buildings of very different design, certain types of subroutines are widely used in a variety of differing applications. Scientific programmers have largely recognized that the same matrix package may be used for both linear programming and quantum mechanics, and that it is not necessary to write two separate specialized program. Persons writing programs for such applications as file management, selective dissemination of information, information storage and retrieval, and text editing, on the other hand, have made minimal use of modular subroutines. Most of them have preferred to write their programs from scratch, much like a builder refusing to use prefab parts on the assumption they will be the wrong size or shape.

We have found that in non-numerical file manipulation and information retrieval, modular subroutines can be as useful and as versatile as in scientific programming. For example, the substitute program, adapted as a subroutine, can be used for such varied jobs as report generation, correction of errors, and computer-assisted typesetting.

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Edition details

• Publisher: Forgotten Books
• Publication date: 2018
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 026585959X
• ISBN 13: 9780265859599
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 78