Programming in Modula-3: An Introduction in Programming with Style - Hardcover

Boszormenyi, Laszlo; Weich, Carsten

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 3540579125 ISBN 13: 9783540579120

Publisher: Springer-Verlag Berlin and Heidelberg GmbH & Co. K, 1996

Synopsis

by Joseph Weizenbaum Since the dawn of the age of computers, people have cursed the difficulty of programming. Over and over again we encounter the suggestion that we should be able to communicate to a computer in natural language what we want it to do. Unfortunately, such advice rests upon a misconception of both the computer and its task. The computer might not be stupid, but it is stubborn. That is, the computer does what all the details of its pro- gram command it to do, i. e. , what the programmer "tells" it to do. And this can be quite different from what the programmer intended. The misun- derstanding with respect to tasks posed to the computer arises from the failure to recognize that such tasks can scarcely be expressed in natural language, if indeed at all. For example, can we practice music, chemistry or mathematics without their respective special symbolic languages? Yet books about computers and programming languages can be written more or less reasonably, even if they are not quite poetic or lyrical. This book can serve as an example of this art and as a model for anyone at- tempting to teach inherently difficult subject matters to others. Klagenfurt, April 1995 Preface Striving to make learning to program easier, this book addresses primarily students beginning a computer science major. For our program examples, we employ a new, elegant programming language, Modula-3.

About this title

From the Back Cover

The difficulty of programming lies in the need to bring our ideas into a form that can be processed by a machine. This book shows how to write and understand even complex programs by applying proper structures and good style. It uses the programming language Modula-3, which relies on and extends the well-known concepts of Pascal and Modula-2. The steps needed to become an expert programmer are based first of all on the elegant type concept of Modula-3. The programming style supported by this concept leads the reader step-by-step toward coping with complex data structures and algorithms. Such new and exciting subjects as object-oriented and parallel programming are touched upon. The book requires no prior programming experience.

Edition details

• Publisher: Springer-Verlag Berlin and Heidelberg GmbH & Co. K
• Publication date: 1996
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 3540579125
• ISBN 13: 9783540579120
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 593