On 03/30/2012 05:58:49 PM, Platonides - [email protected] wrote:
On 30/03/12 17:17, Jim Laurino wrote:
> I also remember Dijkstra, who wrote, long ago now, "no amount of testing
> can prove the absence of defects", and made the unassailable case, at
> least for me, that defects had to be prevented by design. This is
> essentially the "discovery" that the author of the referenced note
> describes. I can not recommend "Notes on structured programming" enough.
> A pdf reprint of the book "Structured Programming", which contains it,
> is available through the ACM. Note that all 3 authors later,
> independently received Turing awards.
I think you mean these ones ? :)
http://www.cs.utexas.edu/users/EWD/ewd02xx/EWD249.PDF
(I just tried to send this, but the text below appears to have been truncated,
so I am trying again. My apologies if this is a duplicate)
Yes, that is the manuscript that was circulated, it makes the major points,
but there was also eventually a small book published, which is now available
again as part of the ACM Classic Book Series, see:
http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1243380&jmp=cit&coll=portal&dl=GUIDE#CIT
The 3 authors are: O.-J. Dahl, E. W. Dijkstra, and C. A. R. Hoare
See the abstract by Hoare, on the ACM site, for a better appreciation of the
book.
also, from the notes at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Structured_programming
"This volume includes an expanded version of the Notes on Structured
Programming, above, including an extended example of using the structured
approach to develop a backtracking algorithm to solve the 8 Queens problem."
He expanded the original manuscript text in the book version at the suggestion
of Niklaus Wirth to give an example of what he meant. It is such a good
exposition of program development that I never bothered to actually run it,
because it was so obvious that it would work correctly.
--
Jim Laurino
[email protected]
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