Abstract
The overarching theme of this book has been the story of how computational agency has, over a period of several centuries, migrated from humans to machines. This migration brought with it the need to find a new kind of language, one which was adequate to express computational processes in such a way that they could be carried out mechanically. To begin with, mathematical logic only formalized the language of imperative statements and proof, however, and it was not until the mid-1930s that completely formal notations for the expression of algorithms and computational processes were developed. These particular notations turned out not to be ideally suited for use with the technology of automatic computation that was emerging in the same period, however, and several decades were to pass before developments converged on a stable set of basic concepts and ideas. It is a central proposal of this book that this convergence was the achievement of the Algol research programme, the tradition of work that was inspired by the Algol 60 language proposals and culminated in the widespread adoption of the ideas about programming notation associated with the term ‘structured programming’.
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Notes
- 1.
Lakatos (1970), p. 132.
- 2.
Pickering (1995).
- 3.
Lakatos (1970), p. 135.
- 4.
- 5.
Wilkes et al. (1951).
- 6.
Stroustrup (1994).
- 7.
Gillies (1992).
- 8.
- 9.
- 10.
Jones (2003).
- 11.
- 12.
- 13.
Edwards (1996).
- 14.
Butterfield (1931).
- 15.
See (Edgerton 2006) for discussion of this distinction.
- 16.
Rosen (1964).
- 17.
Rosen (1972).
- 18.
Wexelblat (1981).
- 19.
Gillies and Zheng (2001).
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Priestley, M. (2011). Conclusions. In: A Science of Operations. History of Computing. Springer, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-84882-555-0_12
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