This paper suggests that input and output are basic primitives of programming and that parallel composition of communicating sequential processes is a fundamental program structuring method. When combined with a development of Dijkstra's guarded command, these concepts are surprisingly versatile. Their use is illustrated by sample solutions of a variety of a familiar programming exercises.

/pdf/communicating-sequential-processes-2j6tdrg5nx.pdf

Communicating sequential processes

The use of augmented transition network grammars for the analysis of natural language sentences is described Structure-building actions associated with the arcs of the grammar network allow for the reordering, restructuring, and copying of constituents necessary to produce deep-structure representations of the type normally obtained from a transformational analysis, and conditions on the arcs allow for a powerful selectivity which can rule out meaningless analyses and take advantage of semantic information to guide the parsing The advantages of this model for natural language analysis are discussed in detail and illustrated by examples An implementation of an experimental parsing system for transition network grammars is briefly described

/pdf/transition-network-grammars-for-natural-language-analysis-4mljqcsgc5.pdf

Transition network grammars for natural language analysis

Social science research contains a wealth of knowledge for people seeking to understand collaboration processes. The authors argue that public managers should look inside the “black box” of collaboration processes. Inside, they will find a complex construct of five variable dimensions: governance, administration, organizational autonomy, mutuality, and norms. Public managers must know these five dimensions and manage them intentionally in order to collaborate effectively.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/4096567.pdf

Collaboration Processes: Inside the Black Box

This paper suggests that input and output are basic primitives of programming and that parallel composition of communicating sequential processes is a fundamental program structuring method. When combined with a development of Dijkstra's guarded command, these concepts are surprisingly versatile. Their use is illustrated by sample solutions of a variety of familiar programming exercises.

Global software development is rapidly becoming the norm for technology companies. Previous qualitative research suggests that distributed development may increase development cycle time for individual work items (modification requests). We use both data from the source code change management system and survey data to model the extent of delay in a distributed software development organization and explore several possible mechanisms for this delay. One key finding is that distributed work items appear to take about two and one-half times as long to complete as similar items where all the work is colocated. The data strongly suggest a mechanism for the delay, i.e., that distributed work items involve more people than comparable same-site work items, and the number of people involved is strongly related to the calendar time to complete a work item. We replicate the analysis of change data in a different organization with a different product and different sites and confirm our main findings. We also report survey results showing differences between same-site and distributed social networks, testing several hypotheses about characteristics of distributed social networks that may be related to delay. We discuss implications of our findings for practices and collaboration technology that have the potential for dramatically speeding distributed software development.

/pdf/an-empirical-study-of-speed-and-communication-in-globally-4h7x7sn60c.pdf

An empirical study of speed and communication in globally distributed software development

That kind of intellectual activity which creates a useful whole from its diverse parts may be called the design of a system. Whether the particular activity is the creation of specifications for a major weapon system, the formation of a recommendation to meet a social challenge, or the programming of a computer, the general activity is largely the same. Typically, the objective of a design organization is the creation and assembly of a document containing a coherently structured body of information. We may name this information the system design. It is typically produced for a sponsor who usually desires to carry out some activity guided by the system design. For example, a public official may wish to propose legislation to avert a recurrence of a recent disaster, so he appoints a team to explain the catastrophe. Or a manufacturer needs a new product and designates a product planning activity to specify what should be introduced. The design organization may or may not be involved in the construction of the system it designs. Frequently, in public affairs, there are policies which discourage a group's acting upon its own recommendations, whereas, in private industry, quite the opposite situation often prevails. It seems reasonable to suppose that the knowledge that one will have to carry out one's own recommendations or that this task will fall to others, probably affects some design choices which the individual designer is cailed upon to make. Most design activity requires continually making choices. Many of these choices may be more than design decisions; they may also be personal decisions the designer makes about his own future. As we shall see later, the incentives which exist in a conventional management environment can motivate choices which subvert the intent of the sponsor.!

/pdf/how-do-committees-invent-2vlozn457g.pdf

How do committees invent

A COBOL compiler design is presented which is compact enough to permit rapid, one-pass compilation of a large subset of COBOL on a moderately large computer Versions of the same compiler for smaller machines require only two working tapes plus a compiler tape The methods given are largely applicable to the construction of ALGOL compilers

Design of a separable transition-diagram compiler

Interactive event-driven programs are structured and executed using two types of constructs: interconnectable processing components and flow objects with associated data. Components are interconnected in a hierarchical dataflow network, and references which provide access to flow objects flow on the interconnections. Response to events and bidirectional coordination over multicomponent data paths, even in a distributed object system, employ unidirectional dataflows and intercomponent message sequences mediated by flow objects. Scaling and abstraction of complexity are facilitated by encapsulation of constructed networks into new component definitions. An interactive debugger preserves state as an executing program is edited, permitting an event-driven program to be modified in the intervals between processing of events without reinitialization. A component protection method employs multiple Levels of usage authorization within components, enabling developers to define and distribute new protected components in a decentralized component market.

Dataflow processing with events

This discussion contains a proposal for a universal computer-oriented language (UNCOL) to be used as a common path between the problem-oriented language (POL) and the machine language (ML) in compatible automatic programming systems. (See Ref. 1.)

Proposal for an UNCOL

The compiling technique of discovering the syntactical structure of a well-formed formula of a language by using a \"syntax-directed\" analysis [i], as opposed to incorporating the analysis in machine code, is equivalent in idea to performing a calculation with an interpretive system instead of coding it directly in machine language. The direct method is potentially the faster because interpretation is not required, but in many eases the interpretive method requires significantly less storage and is therefore chosen by necessity. Certmn methods not available to the purist render the speed difference between the interpretive and direct methods imperceptible; with the availability of these methods the use of syntax-directed techniques becomes the only rational choice. Such techniques have been used at the Case Institute of Technology in the design of a twopass COBOL translator whose anticipated processing speed (.measured i~ terms of the number of average machine instructions required to translate completely one input character) is comparable to that of the fastest algebraic translators in existence. This paper discusses a problem in the design of every COBOL processor: gleaning information from the item description entries of the Data Division. It will be seen that the solution presented here is an \"interpretive\" rather than a \"direct\" one, in the sense that the specification to the processor of predefined interrelationships among elements of the source language is expressed not in machine code but in some nonmachine language which is interpreted during compilation. The entries of CoBol item descriptions contain clauses like \" [ ;SAGE IS C O M P U T A T I O N A L \" which ascribe properties to the item in question; in this case the i tem is declared to occur predominantly in arithmetic calculations.

Melvin E. Conway

Papers

How do committees invent

Design of a separable transition-diagram compiler

Dataflow processing with events

Proposal for an UNCOL

Arithmetizing declarations: an application to COBOL