This 1998 note by Dennis Ritchie from comp.lang.c (and also here ) is very current since the concept of noalias has definitely crept back into
Read moreC89 Standard
A text version of a non-final draft is below. Here’s the pdf of the final version. (This foreword is not a part of American National
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Sorting algorithms as recursive functions
This paper is an experiment in presenting programming algorithms as recursive functions, without pseudo-code or genuine code. The algorithms presented are the standard basic sorting
Read morePaxos demystified
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Read moreThe halting problem has nothing to do with computers
“Turing’s work was of course a great contribution to the world of mathematics, but there is a question of exactly how it is related
Read moreSemiotics of functional programming
In contrast to the usual imperative languages (e.g., C, Fortran, and Ada), in which variables represent cells in memory that can be modified using the
Read moreVon Neumann’s critique of automata theory and logic in computer science
These remarks from “THE GENERAL AND LOGICAL THEORY OF AUTOMATA” 1947 are enormously insightful – no surprise. Von Neumann essentially predicts the emergence of the
Read moreSpanner in the works
The developers of Google’s Spanner database built an interesting system but chose to build their own clock synchronization technology instead of getting a more precise
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Comrades Cheyne and Stokes and mathematics
There is a great book of stories by Soviet era radio astronomer Iosef Shklovsky called 5 Billion Vodka Bottles to the Moon which has a
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Flat address spaces: another crank idea for computer architecture
The poor C programming language is ridiculously out of fashion. Critics like to explain how, Dennis Ritchie didn’t know any math, or that the type
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