What Computing Is All About

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xii

   PDF

2. What Is Computing All About?

   • Jan L. A. van de Snepscheut

   Pages 1-9

3. Grammars

   • Jan L. A. van de Snepscheut

   Pages 11-21

4. A Program Notation

   • Jan L. A. van de Snepscheut

   Pages 23-51

5. Regular Expressions

   • Jan L. A. van de Snepscheut

   Pages 53-73

6. Integrated Circuits

   • Jan L. A. van de Snepscheut

   Pages 75-99

7. Recursive Descent Parsing

   • Jan L. A. van de Snepscheut

   Pages 101-120

8. The Halting Problem and Formal Proofs

   • Jan L. A. van de Snepscheut

   Pages 121-138

9. Some Programming Heuristics

   • Jan L. A. van de Snepscheut

   Pages 139-172

10. Efficiency of Programs

    • Jan L. A. van de Snepscheut

    Pages 173-182

11. Functional Programming

    • Jan L. A. van de Snepscheut

    Pages 183-218

12. Program Inversion

    • Jan L. A. van de Snepscheut

    Pages 219-251

13. A Collection of Nice Algorithms

    • Jan L. A. van de Snepscheut

    Pages 253-280

14. Concurrent Programs

    • Jan L. A. van de Snepscheut

    Pages 281-314

15. Implementation Issues: Compilation

    • Jan L. A. van de Snepscheut

    Pages 315-356

16. An Example of a Compiler

    • Jan L. A. van de Snepscheut

    Pages 357-384

17. The Construction of a Processor

    • Jan L. A. van de Snepscheut

    Pages 385-401

18. Back Matter

    Pages 403-476

    PDF

I have always been fascinated with engineering. From Roman bridges and jumbo jets to steam engines and CD players, it is the privilege of the en­ gineer to combine scientific insights and technical possibilities into useful and elegant products. Engineers get a great deal of satisfaction from the usefulness and beauty of their designs. Some of these designs have a major impact on our daily lives, others enable further scientific insights or shift limits of technology. The successful engineer is familiar with the scientific basis of the field and the technology of the components, and has an eye for the envisioned applications. For example, to build an airplane, one had better understand the physics of motion, the structural properties of alu­ minum, and the size of passengers. And the physics of motion requires a mastery of mathematics, in particular calculus. Computers are a marvel of modern engineering. They come in a wide variety and their range of applications seems endless. One of the charac­ teristics that makes computers different from other engineering products is their programmability. Dishwashers have some limited programming capa­ is not the key part of the device. Their essential part is some bility, but it enclosed space where the dishes are stored and flushed with hot water. Computers are embedded in many different environments, but in their case the programming capability is the essential part. All computers are programmed in more or less the same way.

• Computer
• algorithms
• automata
• automata theory
• calculus
• computer science
• data structures
• logic
• optimization
• programming

• California Institute of Technology, Computer Science 256-80, Pasadena, USA

  Jan L. A. Snepscheut

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