Quite a while back, I found a couple of oldish technical-academic books at the local recycling center, and I just got around to cracking one of them. The Language of Computers by Bernard A. Galler (of the University of Michigan and also of Software Patent Institute). Printed by McGraw-Hill in 1962. The amazing thing is how readable it is. It uses a language called MAD (Michigan Algorithm Decoder) which came from IBM’s IAL (which later became ALGOL). It covers the basic structure of the language, control structures (if is called whenever), sorting, searching, cryptography, and a program that produces programs. It’s not nearly as impenetrable as some IBM machine language manuals I looked at from the mid-sixties.
Posted by jim at July 31, 2004 07:40 PM | TrackBackOne of the most interesting problems one can bring to the computer is the writing of its own programs. This is not so difficult as it may sound. We have already seen in Chapter 5 that by means of our language we have been able to translate sequences of characters into other sequences of characters. Writing a program is also the generation of of sequences of characters(to make up statements), except that we need a rule (or algorithm) to determine which sequences to generate.