This ebook is the first authorized digital version of Kernighan and Ritchie's 1988 classic, The C Programming Language (2nd Ed.). One of the best-selling programming books published in the last fifty years, "K&R" has been called everything from the "bible" to "a landmark in computer science" and it has influenced generations of programmers. Available now for all leading ebook platforms, this concise and beautifully written text is a "must-have" reference for every serious programmers digital library.

As modestly described by the authors in the Preface to the First Edition, this "is not an introductory programming manual; it assumes some familiarity with basic programming concepts like variables, assignment statements, loops, and functions. Nonetheless, a novice programmer should be able to read along and pick up the language, although access to a more knowledgeable colleague will help."

The C programming language

Will Tracz, our esteemed editor and Used-Program salesman, has written an entertaining, non-technical book dealing with the practice (and lack of) of software reuse. Its a collection of essays, mostly rehashed (reused?) and updated from various columns and papers published over the years.. Its a short (a bit over 200 pages) easy reading and enjoyable book (I read most of it in one sitting). Some of the essays discuss what was printed in the past and a discussion of the current status of the points.

Safeware: System Safety and Computers

The future of software engineering lies in automation and will exploit the combined strengths of generative programming, domainspecific languages, and automatic programming. While each of these areas is still in its infancy, a spectacularly successful example of their combination was realized twenty-five years ago: relational query optimization. In this paper, I chart the successes and mindset used by database researchers to generate efficient query processing programs automatically. I argue that the road that they have so successfully followed is the same road that the generative programming, domain-specific languages, and automatic programming communities are now traversing.

Domain-Specific Program Generation

Parallel Scientific Computation: A Structured Approach using BSP and MPI Rob H. Bisseling Hardcover: 324 pages Oxford University Press, USA (May 6, 2004) Language: English ISBN: 0198529392 In spite of many efforts, no solid framework exists for developing parallel software that is portable and efficient across various parallel architectures. The lack of such framework is mostly due to the absence of a universal model of parallel computation, which can play a role similar to that which Von Neumann’s model plays for the sequential computing, and inhibit the diversity of the existing parallel architecture and parallel programming models. Bulk Synchronous Parallel (BSP) is a parallel computing model proposed by Valiant in 1989, which provides a useful and elegant theoretical framework for bridging the gap between parallel hardware and software. This model comprises a computer archicture (BSP computer), a class of algorithms (BSP algorithm), and a performance model (BSP cost function). The attraction of BSP model lays in its simplicity. A BSP computer consists of collection of processors, each with private memory, and a communication network. A BSP algorithm consists of a sequence of supersteps. A superstep contains either a number of computation steps or a number of communication steps, followed by global barrier synchronization. A BSP performance cost function is based on four parameters: number of processors (p), processor computing rate (r), the ratio between the computation time and communication time (g), and the synchronization cost (l). In Parallel Scientific Computation: A Structured Approach using BSP and MPI, Rob Bisseling provides a practical introduction to the area of numerical scientific computation by using BSPlib communication library in parallel algorithm design and parallel programming. Each chapter contains: an abstract; a brief discussion of sequential algorithm included to make the material self-contain; the design and analysis of a parallel algorithm; an annotated program text; illustrative experimental results of an implementation on a particular parallel computer; bibliographic notes; theoretical and practical exercises. The source files of the printed program texts, together with a set of test programs that demonstrate their use, form a package called BSPedupack, which is available at the official home page of the book. Researchers, students, and savvy professionals, schooled in hardware or software, will value Bisseling's self-study approach to parallel scientific programming. After all, this is the first textbook provides a comprehensive overview of the technical aspects of building parallel programs using BSP. The book opens with an overview of BSP model and BSPlib, which tell you how to get started with writing BSP programs, and how to benchmark your computer as a BSP computer. Chapter 2 on dense LU decomposition presents a regular computation with communication patterns that are common in matrix computations. Chapter 3 on the FFT also treats a regular computation but one with a more complex flow of data. Chapter 4 presents the multiplication of a sparse matrix and dense vector. Appendix C presents MPI programs in the order of the corresponding BSP programs appear in the main text. The book includes a reasonable amount of real world examples, which support the theoretical aspects of the discussions. It is easy to follow and includes logical and consistent exposition and clear descriptions of basic and advanced techniques. Being a textbook, it contains various exercises and project assignments at the end of each chapter. However, sample solutions for these exercises are still not available. Perhaps an accompanying CD carrying the sample solutions and tutorials for use in the classroom would have added to the academic value of the book. However, the bibliographic notes given at the ends of each chapter, as well as the references at the end of the book, are quite useful for those interested in exploring the subject of BSP development further. The book is contemporary, well presented, and balanced between concepts and the technical depth required for developing parallel algorithms. Although the book takes a simple performance view of parallel algorithms design, readers should have some basic knowledge of parallel computing, data structures, and C programming. Overall, the book is suitable as a textbook for one-term undergraduate or graduate courses, as a self-study book, or as technical training material for professionals. Ami Marowka Department of Software Engineering Shenkar College of Engineering and Design Ramat-Gan, Israel.

Parallel Scientific Computation: A Structured Approach using BSP and MPI

This paper develops Brinch-Hansen's concept of a monitor as a method of structuring an operating system. It introduces a form of synchronization, describes a possible method of implementation in terms of semaphores and gives a suitable proof rule. Illustrative examples include a single resource scheduler, a bounded buffer, an alarm clock, a buffer pool, a disk head optimizer, and a version of the problem of readers and writers.

Monitors: An Operating System Structuring Concept

http://www.lacl.fr/gava/papers/gesbert_gava_loulergue_dabrowski_fgcs_2008.pdf

Bulk synchronous parallel ML with exceptions

Feasible Reactivity for Synchronous Cooperative Threads

A fundamental issue in multithreaded programming is detecting data races . A program is said to be well synchronised if it does not contain data races w.r.t. an interleaving semantics. Formally ensuring this property is central, because the java Memory Model then guarantees that one can safely reason on the interleaved semantics of the program. In this work we formalise in the coq proof assistant a java bytecode data race analyser based on the conditional must-not alias analysis of Naik and Aiken. The formalisation includes a context-sensitive points-to analysis and an instrumented semantics that counts method calls and loop iterations. Our java -like language handles objects, virtual method calls, thread spawning and lock and unlock operations for threads synchronisation.

A Certified Data Race Analysis for a Java-like Language

Reactivity is an essential property of a synchronous program. Informally, it guarantees that at each instant the program fed with an input will"react" producing an output. In the present work, we consider a refined property that we call feasible reactivity. Beyond reactivity, this property guarantees that at each instant both the size of the program and its reaction time are bounded by a polynomial in the size of the parameters at the beginning of the computation and the size of the largest input. We propose a method to annotate programs and we develop related static analysis techniques that guarantee feasible reactivity for programs expressed in the SΠ-calculus. The latter is a synchronous version of the Π-calculus based on the SL synchronous programming model.

/pdf/feasible-reactivity-in-a-synchronous-p-calculus-2744vp5oqz.pdf

Feasible reactivity in a synchronous Π-calculus

This paper presents a new functional parallel language: Minimally Synchronous Parallel ML (MSPML). The execution time can be estimated, dead-locks and indeterminism are avoided. Programs are written as usual ML programs but using a small set of additional functions. Provided functions are used to access the parameters of the parallel machine and to create and operate on a parallel data structure. It follows the execution and cost model of the Message Passing Machine model (MPM). It shares with Bulk Synchronous Parallel ML its syntax and high-level semantics but it has a minimally synchronous distributed semantics. Experiments have been run on a cluster of PC using an implementation of the Diffusion algorithmic skeleton.

Frédéric Dabrowski

Papers

Bulk synchronous parallel ML with exceptions

Feasible Reactivity for Synchronous Cooperative Threads

A Certified Data Race Analysis for a Java-like Language

Feasible reactivity in a synchronous Π-calculus

Semantics and Implementation of Minimally Synchronous Parallel ML