Konrad Zuse and his Plankalkül: The Hope to Emerge from the Sleep of Sleeping Beauty

2019 ◽  
Vol 13 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 249-265
Author(s):  
Carla Petrocelli
Keyword(s):  
Programming Languages ◽  
Predicate Logic ◽  
Sleeping Beauty ◽  
General Purpose ◽  
Formal Logic ◽  
Writing Programs ◽  
Living Room ◽  
World War ◽  
Processing Data ◽  
Notational System

Germany, 1935: the engineer Konrad Zuse (1910–1995), in the living room of his Berlin house, devotes himself to the design and construction of a binary, programmable machine, the Z1, capable of processing data in a fast and efficient way. While building his machines, he also started to devise a conceptual and notational system for writing ‘programs’ to execute applications much more complex than the basic arithmetic calculations. He delved deep into the study of formal logic in order to work out his “computation plan”, the Plankalkül. Although the Plan Calculus didn't exercise much impact on German post-World War hardships, it displays all the traits currently recognized as standard features of modern programming languages. The aim of the present study is to highlight the general purpose and technical specifics of this language, its historical and scientific background, and the philosophical inspiration leading Konrad Zuse to employ the predicate logic in the formalization of the “computation projects” for his machines.

Real-time MLton: A Standard ML runtime for real-time functional programs

2021 ◽  
Vol 31 ◽  
Author(s):  
BHARGAV SHIVKUMAR ◽  
JEFFREY MURPHY ◽  
LUKASZ ZIAREK
Keyword(s):  
Programming Languages ◽  
Real Time ◽  
Concurrency Control ◽  
General Purpose ◽  
Functional Languages ◽  
Control Mechanisms ◽  
Real Time Systems ◽  
Functional Programming Languages ◽  
Standard Ml ◽  
Time Systems

Abstract There is a growing interest in leveraging functional programming languages in real-time and embedded contexts. Functional languages are appealing as many are strictly typed, amenable to formal methods, have limited mutation, and have simple but powerful concurrency control mechanisms. Although there have been many recent proposals for specialized domain-specific languages for embedded and real-time systems, there has been relatively little progress on adapting more general purpose functional languages for programming embedded and real-time systems. In this paper, we present our current work on leveraging Standard ML (SML) in the embedded and real-time domains. Specifically, we detail our experiences in modifying MLton, a whole-program optimizing compiler for SML, for use in such contexts. We focus primarily on the language runtime, reworking the threading subsystem, object model, and garbage collector. We provide preliminary results over a radar-based aircraft collision detector ported to SML.

scholarly journals “Making Nonsense of the Little Categories”: Slaughterhouse-Five and The Memoirs of a Survivor as autobiographical science fiction

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
◽  
Georgia Hight
Keyword(s):  
Science Fiction ◽  
Second World War ◽  
Living Room ◽  
World War ◽  
Time And Space ◽  
Traumatic Memories ◽  
Non Fiction ◽  
Southern Rhodesia ◽  
The City ◽  
Second World

<p>Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five (1969) and Doris Lessing’s The Memoirs of a Survivor (1974) are both novels that blend autobiography with science fiction. In a review of Vonnegut’s Mother Night, Lessing writes that he “makes nonsense of the little categories”. The same applies to Lessing. These two novels live in the porous borders between genre—between fiction and non-fiction.  Vonnegut writes that he can’t remember much of his experiences in the firebombing of Dresden in the Second World War. The war novel he writes about them has a protagonist who is “unstuck in time”. I frame my discussion of Slaughterhouse around problems of temporal and narrative ordering. Through use of fractured time, repetitions, and the chronotope, Vonnegut finds a way to express his missing and traumatic memories of the war.  Lessing’s memories are of her early childhood in Persia and Southern Rhodesia. These memories are warped, claustrophobic, and difficult to articulate. Like Slaughterhouse, Memoirs fractures time and space. I organise my discussion of Lessing’s novel around the latter, focusing on a literalised porous border: her dissolving living room wall. Borders and portals between spaces in Memoirs blend the dystopian, science-fiction world of the city with the world of Lessing’s memories; dreams with reality; and the static with the dynamic.  I pose several answers to the question of why science fiction and autobiography. A shared occupation of the two authors was a concern for the madness and dissolution of society, and science fiction engages in a tradition of expressing these concerns. Additionally, Vonnegut and Lessing use the tools of a genre in which it is acceptable for time and space to be warped or fractured. These tools not only allow for the expression of memories that are fragmented, difficult, and half forgotten, but produce worlds that mirror the form of these personal memories.</p>

MDA, Metamodeling and Transformation

2010 ◽  
pp. 34-47
Author(s):  
Liliana María Favre
Keyword(s):  
Programming Languages ◽  
General Purpose ◽  
Modeling Languages ◽  
Domain Specific Languages ◽  
Domain Specific ◽  
Underlying Principle

MDA requires the ability to understand different languages such as general purpose languages, domain specific languages, modeling languages or programming languages. An underlying principle of MDA for integrating semantically in a unified and interoperable way such languages is using metamodeling techniques.

Colossus, Codebreaking, and the Digital Age

Colossus ◽  
2006 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen Budiansky
Keyword(s):  
Digital Age ◽  
General Purpose ◽  
Second World War ◽  
World War ◽  
Men And Women ◽  
The People ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Government ◽  
Post War ◽  
Second World

The paths that took men and women from their ordinary lives and deposited them on the doorstep of the odd profession of cryptanalysis were always tortuous, accidental, and unpredictable. The full story of the Colossus, the pioneering electronic device developed by the Government Code and Cypher School (GC & CS) to break German teleprinter ciphers in the Second World War, is fundamentally a story of several of these accidental paths converging at a remarkable moment in the history of electronics—and of the wartime urgency that set these men and women on these odd paths. Were it not for the wartime necessity of codebreaking, and were it not for particular statistical and logical properties of the teleprinter ciphers that were so eminently suited to electronic analysis, the history of computing might have taken a very different course. The fact that Britain’s codebreakers cracked the high-level teleprinter ciphers of the German Army and Luftwaffe high command during the Second World War has been public knowledge since the 1970s. But the recent declassification of new documents about Colossus and the teleprinter ciphers, and the willingness of key participants to discuss their roles more fully, has laid bare as never before the technical challenges they faced—not to mention the intense pressures, the false steps, and the extraordinary risks and leaps of faith along the way. It has also clarified the true role that the Colossus machines played in the advent of the digital age. Though they were neither general-purpose nor stored-program computers themselves, the Colossi sparked the imaginations of many scientists, among them Alan Turing and Max Newman, who would go on to help launch the post-war revolution that ushered in the age of the digital, general-purpose, stored-program electronic computer. Yet the story of Colossus really begins not with electronics at all, but with codebreaking; and to understand how and why the Colossi were developed and to properly place their capabilities in historical context, it is necessary to understand the problem they were built to solve, and the people who were given the job of solving it.

scholarly journals Featherweight generic confinement

2006 ◽  
Vol 16 (6) ◽  
pp. 793-811 ◽  
Author(s):  
ALEX POTANIN ◽  
JAMES NOBLE ◽  
DAVE CLARKE ◽  
ROBERT BIDDLE
Keyword(s):  
Programming Languages ◽  
Ad Hoc ◽  
Type System ◽  
Type Systems ◽  
General Purpose ◽  
Ownership Type ◽  
Essential Change ◽  
Polymorphic Type ◽  
Syntactic Restrictions

Existing approaches to object encapsulation either rely on ad hoc syntactic restrictions or require the use of specialised type systems. Syntactic restrictions are difficult to scale and to prove correct, while specialised type systems require extensive changes to programming languages. We demonstrate that confinement can be enforced cheaply in Featherweight Generic Java, with no essential change to the underlying language or type system. This result demonstrates that polymorphic type parameters can simultaneously act as ownership parameters and should facilitate the adoption of confinement and ownership type systems in general-purpose programming languages.

scholarly journals Review article: Is war necessary for economic growth?

2007 ◽  
Vol 2 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Jurgen Brauer
Keyword(s):  
Economic Growth ◽  
World War Ii ◽  
Technological Development ◽  
General Purpose ◽  
World War ◽  
Oxford University ◽  
General Purpose Technologies ◽  
Military Procurement ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Post War

The article reviews Vernon Ruttan's new book, Is Growth Necessary for Economic Growth? Military Procurement and Technological Development (Oxford University Press, 2006). The subject matter is limited to the post-world war II United States only. Studying six general-purpose technologies emerging from war environments, the book claims that much of the U.S. post-war growth experience can be attributed to them. The reviewer finds that this is not Prof. Ruttan's best work, in part because the underlying research is too casual to support the conclusions drawn.

The Turn to Logic and the Transformation of an Ancient Quarrel

Poetics Today ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 41 (1) ◽  
pp. 83-100
Author(s):  
Kristin Boyce
Keyword(s):  
Predicate Logic ◽  
Analytic Philosophy ◽  
Formal Logic ◽  
Early Form ◽  
Analytic Tradition ◽  
New Form

The development of an analytic tradition in philosophy is bound up with a newly intensified interest in logic, and Frege’s development of a new form of logical notation — an early form of what is now called predicate logic — is one of the conditions that made that tradition possible. At the same time, the development of analytic philosophy is also tied to a turn away from what had until that time been a natural and often mutually beneficial exchange with poetry, drama, and fiction. It is easy to assume that the turn away from literature is a necessary consequence of the turn to logic. This essay argues that in fact there are good reasons to think that if we follow the turn to formal logic through, it instead pushes philosophy back into a transformed and perhaps deeper kind of conversation with literature. The terms that organize this renewed conversation are those of a shared preoccupation not with certain ideas or content but with the power of form. The upshot is that the turn to formal logic returns philosophy to a transformed version of the “ancient quarrel” with which it began.

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