Donald Knuth. The Remaining Trouble Spots in ALGOL 60. Communications of the ACM 10(10):611--618, October 1967  Home/Search   Document Not in Database   Summary   Related Articles   Check

....there are many mistakes and ambiguities in the report. It is worth looking at some of these problems, as they are typical of the informal descriptions of programming languages. These problems are discussed in detail by Donald Knuth in his 1967 paper The Remaining Trouble Spots in ALGOL 60 [Knuth67]. The first ambiguity that becomes apparent to the reader is that errors are not very well described. Niklaus Wirth writes [Wirth74] that the real challenge in compiling is not the detection of correct sentential forms, but coping with ill formed, erroneous programs, in diagnosing the mistakes ....

....report as saying that the implementation of the language must solve the halting problem The explanations of what is meant by the if then else construct provide examples of unclear or misleading explanations in language specifications. These problems are mentioned by Donald Knuth in his article [Knuth67]. When the if then else construct is used with expressions, the else part is mandatory. hif clausei : if hBoolean expressioni then harithmetic expressioni : hsimple arithmetic expressionij hif clausei hsimple arithmetic expressioni else harithmetic expressioni Yet in the explanation of the ....

Donald Knuth. The Remaining Trouble Spots in ALGOL 60. Communications of the ACM 10(10):611--618, October 1967

....research on the specification of Algol 60. The original 1960 specification [10] of the language is one of the most influential software specifications ever written. Predictably, it was found to have difficulties which led to a revised specification [33] in 1963. In 1967 Donald Knuth wrote a survey [22] of the difficulties in these specifications; his comments cover some of the persistent problems arising in specifying complex software systems: When Algol 60 was first published in 1960, many new features were introduced into programming languages. It was quite difficult at first for ....

....had never before realized were possible, each time they reread the Report. Such constructions often provided counterexamples to many of the usual techniques of compiler implementation, and in many cases it was possible to construct programs that could be interpreted in more than one way. [22] on page 611) When one switches from the view that a system is built, and its functionality is documented, to the view that the functionality of the system is specified, and the system is built to meet its specification, then there is a corresponding increase in the pressure on specifiers to use ....

D. E. Knuth. The remaining troublespots in algol 60. Comm. ACM, 10(10):611--617, 1967.

....a programming language carefully is a traditional challenge dating back at least to the specification of Algol 60 [4,17] possibly one of the first programming languages to be specified precisely by something different from an implementation. Many of the problems that arose with that specification [12] are still issues now, but there are also some new challenges brought on by the changing role of modern programming languages. Several of these apply to PLAN: ffl Programming mobile agents. ffl Programming networks. ffl Using Domain Specific Languages (DSL s) and scripting languages. ffl ....

D. E. Knuth. The remaining troublespots in algol 60. Comm. ACM, 10(10):611--617, 1967.

....there are many mistakes and ambiguities in the report. It is worth looking at some of these problems, as they are typical of the informal descriptions of programming languages. These problems are discussed in detail by Donald Knuth in his 1967 paper The Remaining Trouble Spots in ALGOL 60 [Knuth67]. The first ambiguity that becomes apparent to the reader is that errors are not well described. Niklaus Wirth writes [Wirth74] that the real challenge in compiling is not the detection of correct sentential forms, but coping with ill formed, erroneous programs, in diagnosing the mistakes and in ....

Donald Knuth. The Remaining Trouble Spots in ALGOL 60. Communications of the ACM 10(10):611--618, October 1967

....formality. There are informal presentations of semantics, as can be found in programming language manuals. Such descriptions give a rough idea of the meaning of the constructs, but do not always explain the meaning in all possible application contexts. Just remember the famous example of ALGOL 60 [16], where it took several years to detect numerous ambiguities. To have a detailed semantic understanding of the language constructs becomes even more significant in reverse engineering, where one often has to understand programs written by others with different programming styles. This requires a ....

D. Knuth. The remaining troublespots of ALGOL 60. Communications of the ACM, 10(10):611--617, 1967.

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D. E. Knuth. The remaining trouble spots in ALGOL 60. Communications of the ACM, 10:611-- 618, October 1967.

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