Al Gore and the Internet
From https://web.eecs.umich.edu/~fessler Here is the definitive statement on Gore's involvement in "inventing" the Internet, from the guys who really did:...
View ArticleKuth’s Merge Sort in C
Taken from Knuth Algorithm S mergesort P162-163 Vol 3 Second edition 1998 The major change is that the scratch buffer is not required to be adjacent and there are some changes because C array indexing...
View Articledon’t defer
There is a proposal to add “defer” to C. Its biggest example is taken from code that was originally designed to not manage storage at all, but to run once and exit – delegating all the cleanup to...
View ArticleMathematics errors in computer science
A trivial theorem, more of a tautology, on networking and Turing’s deep theorem on decidability are both widely cited, widely misunderstood and widely misapplied in computer science. It is often...
View ArticleUnforgivable C programming 1
As many people never tire of explaining, the C language is obsolete, unsafe, unwelcome in polite company and generally looked down on by thought leaders and adepts of λ calculus alike. Here’s a...
View ArticleProcess algebra and automata theory
Milner’s Communication and Concurrency contrasts a notion of “bisimulation” with what he characterizes as the view in standard automata theory. Standard automata theory, however, has a much more...
View ArticleLecture notes on Paxos
PAXOS – (c) Victor Yodaiken, 2022 These are the lecture notes, or see the paper. 1. Really clever distributed consensus algorithm by Leslie Lamport A. Infamously hard to understand - but not...
View ArticleThreads in C
There is a nice example thread semantics in a paper by David Goldblatt (P1916R0) which illustrates a couple of things about multi-core processing – including how interesting it is and how poorly...
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Open Source, Free Music Downloading, and Intellectual Property
Mark Twain, via Wikimedia. “A day is coming, when, in the eye of the law, literary property will be as sacred as whisky, or any other of the necessaries of life.” —Mark Twain” Inventors, programmers,...
View ArticleMemory model and semantics for C
A perceptive note from Linus Torvalds about the C/C++ “memory model” is reproduced below. From Linus Torvalds <> Date Thu, 7 Jun 2018 08:40:49 -0700 Subject Re: LKMM litmus test for Roman...
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Dissing the PDP11
In computer science academia, C along with UNIX, and PDP11s, is as unfashionable as can be: the equivalent of other 1970’s relics, like polyester leisure suits and mullets. In 2018 ACM Queue published...
View ArticleUndefined behavior in C is a reading error.
Considering how important “undefined behavior” has become to C semantics and the ISO/IEC JTC1/SC22/WG14 Committee, the lack of any reference to it in the K&R ANSI book is notable and the...
View ArticleC is not a serious programming language
The C Standards process over the last few decades has addressed both optimization and pointer type safety largely through a concept called “undefined behavior”. The idea is that instead of positive...
View ArticleDennis Ritchie on alias analysis in the C programming language 1988
This 1998 note by Dennis Ritchie from comp.lang.c (and also here ) is very current since the concept of noalias has definitely crept back into the standard. I have reproduced it verbatim, but lightly...
View ArticleC89 Standard
(This foreword is not a part of American National Standard for Information Systems --- Programming Language C, X3.???-1988.) American National Standard Programming Language C specifies the syntax and...
View ArticleVon Neumann’s critique of automata theory and logic in computer science
These remarks from “THE GENERAL AND LOGICAL THEORY OF AUTOMATA” 1947 are, not surprisingly, enormously insightful. Von Neumann essentially predicts the emergence of the field of analysis of algorithms...
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