Nota Bene: Caveat Scriptor (Part 2)

The Programming Languages (PL) Track provides researchers and practitioners with a forum to present their ideas and experience in designing new programming concepts and implementing programming languages. It includes the topics of Compiling Techniques, Domain-Specific Languages, Formal Semantics and Syntax, Garbage Collection, Language Design and Implementation, Languages for Modeling, Model-Driven Development and Model Transformation, New Programming Language Ideas and Concepts, New Programming Paradigms, Practical Experiences with Programming Languages, Program Analysis and Verification, Program Generation and Transformation, Programming Languages from All Paradigms (Agent-Oriented, Aspect-Oriented, Functional, Logic, Object-Oriented, etc.), and Visual Programming Languages.

The Programming Languages (PL) Track provides researchers and practitioners with a forum to present their ideas and experience in designing new programming concepts and implementing programming languages. It includes the topics of Compiling Techniques, Domain-Specific Languages, Formal Semantics and Syntax, Garbage Collection, Language Design and Implementation, Languages for Modeling, Model-Driven Development and Model Transformation, New Programming Language Ideas and Concepts, New Programming Paradigms, Practical Experiences with Programming Languages, Program Analysis and Verification, Program Generation and Transformation, Programming Languages from All Paradigms (Agent-Oriented, Aspect-Oriented, Functional, Logic, Object-Oriented, etc.), and Visual Programming Languages.

The Programming Languages (PL) Track provides researchers and practitioners with a forum to present their ideas and experience in designing new programming concepts and implementing programming languages. It includes the topics of Compiling Techniques, Domain-Specific Languages, Formal Semantics and Syntax, Garbage Collection, Language Design and Implementation, Languages for Modeling, Model-Driven Development and Model Transformation, New Programming Language Ideas and Concepts, New Programming Paradigms, Practical Experiences with Programming Languages, Program Analysis and Verification, Program Generation and Transformation, Programming Languages from All Paradigms (Agent-Oriented, Aspect-Oriented, Functional, Logic, Object-Oriented, etc.), and Visual Programming Languages.

In a recent newsletter (Summer, 1985) and a subsequent special announcement to its members, the Modern Language Association has endorsed for the first time, and is currently marketing, an integrated word processing and data base management package for use on microcomputers (Nota Bene, Dragonfly Software Company, $495 list price, special price of $396 to MLA members). Writing for PC Magazine (July 23, 1985, p. 64), Stephen Manes takes note of that unusual endorsement and underlines the Association's intention to market directly to its own members and those of related organizations. We found the MLA announcement to be of immediate interest, since we are in the initial stages of an extensive annotated bibliography on the avant-garde in Latin America. We have available for project use an IBM PC-XT (20 MB hard disk capacity), but up to this point our searches for adequate software support have been largely unsuccessful. Most packages have been designed for business use and are not adaptable to our needs. The excellent Finder/Search Companion retrieval system, designed by Aaron/Smith Associates for library use, was promising as an integrated system, but the entire package would have cost nearly $2,000. In that context Nota Bene appeared to offer integration of various important functions, multilingual word processing, and the generation of cross-listings and indexes at a price which was acceptable. On the strength of those announced capabilities we ordered Nota Bene, have installed it on our system, and have begun to make use of it in our project. We should note that we are not programmers nor computer scientists, but we do have several years combined experience in word processing and data base management on both microcomputers and mainframe systems. It is precisely our intention to use Nota Bene extensively that motivates our comments in the pages of Hispania. This review is a preliminary assessment of the package as we have installed it and have been able to use it up to this point. After we have had an opportunity to test Nota Bene's capabilities with materials from our own project, we will provide a more complete evaluation. At this moment, however, we will describe the package for potential AATSP users, omment on the installation process, and provide an evaluation of the support and training materials.

There are two somewhat contradictory ways of looking at modules in a given programming language. On the one hand, module systems are largely independent of the particulars of programming languages. On the other hand, the module constructs may interfere with the programming constructs, and may be redundant with the other scope mechanisms of a specific programming language, such as closures for instance. There is therefore a need to unify the programming concepts that are similar, and retain a minimum number of essential constructs to avoid arbitrary programming choices. In this paper, we realize this aim in the framework of linear logic concurrent constraint programming (LCC) languages. We first show how declarations and closures can be internalized as agents in a variant of LCC for which we provide precise operational and logical semantics in linear logic. Then, we show how a complete module system can be represented within LCC, and prove for it a general code protection property. Finally we study the instanciation of this scheme to the implementation of a safe module system for constraint logic programs, and conclude on the generality of this approach to programming languages with logical variables.

Much to the disappointment of hard core disk operating system (DOS) wizards, many computer users have little knowledge of DOS commands and, in fact, they may not need much DOS knowledge in the future.Computer users today are able to manage files and move from application to application without directly invoking a DOS command. Application packages such as word processors, spread sheets, and data bases provide for file management. Special software programs are available that allow the user to backup an entire hard disk without any knowledge of DOS.Menu programs can be placed on a hard disk which allow the user to choose applications without knowing DOS commands. Perhaps the most creative programs to help the user avoid DOS, are the DOS management systems available on the market today which allow the user to speak English while the program speaks DOS to the system.On some campuses personnel are available to install and set up computers with hard disks using menu programs, applications, and DOS management programs. The user is trained in using the application and shown how to work with the menu system. As long as the system does not have a hardware or software problem, the user is able to be productive without extensive training in DOS commands. This process saves a great deal of time and money in training the computer user. Emphasis can be placed on training programs in areas where there is direct return for the time and money spent.Certainly a case could be developed to support DOS training for all computer users. Knowledge of the operating system, file management, backup procedures, etc. could be a tremendous advantage for the user. However, management must weigh the expenditure of time and cost against the advantages of training a staff in MS-DOS. Furthermore, not all computer users will find DOS friendly and their attempt to use the DOS commands could become frustrating and time consuming.

Learning programming is a difficult task. Such difficulties depends on the chosen programming language and the exposure to the single programming concept. Mainstream programming languages such as Java, C and C++ are the most popular. But their innate complexity and the complexity of their tools risk to divert students' attention from the key point of learning appropriate programming techniques in general. Students that approach learning programming tend to focus on learning the programming language since it looks more practicable. The prominent issue lies within the core components of these languages: each programming language consists of many different features-such as control flow, variable definition, and so on-, each bound to a different group of constructs of the language. Due to their strict intertwining, the students are forced to keep up with a considerable quantity of unknown constructs and concepts since the beginning. This issue aggravates if we consider that many of these constructs are not meant to be fully explained until much further in the course, or worse, never. Also support tools, as IDEs, do not help the teacher in the compartmentalization of the programming concepts since they provide the students with code skeletons to fill without considering any language restriction. Teaching basic and advanced programming courses taught us that students tend to confuse the learning of programming with the learning of the programming language. The students try to master the programming language by learning any tiny little detail of it; in the hope that such details hide an easy solution to the proposed assignments. Evidently, this approach promotes the wrong belief that to learn programming means to learn the programming language instead of the correct thinking that programming is a matter of being able to solve problems independently of the used programming language. Problem solving is typically taught by examples and this approach seconds the misbelief the students have about what programming is. The solution to a problem is often presented as an already cooked algorithm written in the programming language of choice. Hardly the teacher has the time during his lesson to present the mind process to get to such a solution, since he is already busy in describing the syntactic constructs used in the program, what they do, and all the possible variants the language proposes. Students that still have to tune up their programming skills are disoriented by this approach: they understand what the program does but they cannot either cook their own solution or adapt the proposed solution to a different context. More pre-cooked solutions they get and more difficult for them becomes to separate the programming language from the problem solving. At the very end, students rarely get acquainted to the full-extent of the programming language they use, and they feel disoriented when facing problems that slightly divert from those presented in the lectures. Even smarter students maintain a solving approach based upon few constructs that they master at the best, which often is not the most effective approach. This is a more evident side-effect when the learner is exposed to the whole language since the beginning and without any constraints on what construct to use in solving a given problem. Training students to problem solving means to let them fully explore what they have at their hands, sometimes addressing them to different solution strategies. But if the tool is too complex, the exploration requires too much time that the students steal from thinking about the problem. Sometimes the only way to get students to experiment something is to force them in that direction by limiting the choice to a particular group of language constructs. Some extreme positions include to delay the coding and thus the learning of the language. In our opinion, this could help the students to focus on problem solving but coding and all the other aspects related to it are part of the learning process and cannot be avoided. However, we agree that if the students could have access to only a portion of the language and adequate support tools at any stage of their learning process they could focus more on the problem solving aspect and gradually master both the language and how to use it to solve problems. Summarizing our experience as teachers, we could conclude that to render more effective the learning of programming the students have to: i) focus on problem solving, ii) learn mainstream programming languages, and iii) be gradually exposed to new concepts. Therefore the teaching strategy that accomplishes such requirements should be the one where the students are guided to learn how to program through a gradual and tool supported disclosing of language features. In this work we propose an approach to gradually teaching programming supported by a programming language that grows along with the number of concepts presented to the students. The proposed approach can be applied to the teaching of any programming language and some experiments with Javascript are reported.

Correspondence to: Angela Coulter. General practitioners who consider computerising their patients' records are faced with a bewildering array of software systems from which to choose. The availability of independent advice and guidance on computer systems for general practitioners varies from region to region but on the whole is fairly poor. The Oxford community health project has developed experience in providing advice and training for general practitioners in the Oxford region on buying and using microcomputer systems in their practices. We describe how we obtained information on various systems and the facilities available in them. The Oxford community health project has been a pioneer in promoting computing in general practice since it was established in 1970 as a collaborative venture between Oxford University's unit of clinical epidemiology and Oxford Regional Health Authority. The project was originally established to provide support to about 40 practices using the regional computer unit's mainframe and to undertake collabo? rative research in general practice. The mainframe service, which is still used by 23 practices, provides facilities for registering patients, recall, and listing records of patients with chronic diseases or other problems.1 Over the past five years several practices partici? pating in the project have chosen the added advantages of on line computer time?for example, five practices shared an Alpha Micro system running British Medical Data Systems software,2 3 and others bought their own systems. In response to the growing demand for advice on microcomputing in the Oxford region the project has widened its scope to provide advice on the facilities of microcomputers and information systems in primary care. A priority was to develop a source of information on the systems available for general practitioners. The first step in compiling the fist of specialist systems and the facilities that they offered was to search reports on computing in general practice. By this means we identified 41 systems marketed by 40 suppliers that were or had been on the market in the past five years. All firms were contacted by letter and asked to provide information on their systems to help in the task of advising general practitioners. From the information received we constructed a chart to show the facilities each claimed to provide. We returned a copy of our interpretation of the system to each supplier with a request for comments, amendments, and corrections as well as details of any planned changes. We asked the suppliers to provide prices for two systems: a single user system with one printer and a 20 megabyte hard disk, and a multiuser system with four screens and four printers and a 40 megabyte hard disk. We also asked how many systems they had installed and in which areas; and whether they could install and support systems in the Oxford region. The systems We received replies from 17 suppliers. Fourteen of these were suppliers of current systems; the three others did meet the criteria for inclusion in this report (combined hardware and software packages available throughout the United Kingdom). Five systems were no longer marketed, although they may still be in use in practices. Four letters were returned by the Post Office marked not known at this and the remaining 15 companies did reply. All systems have a database that can hold such information as each patient's name, address, and title, date of birth, age, and sex. Once this information is recorded it is easy to institute call and recall systems and to compile registers of particular groups of patients. In addition, some systems offer the facility to record details of consultations, risk factors, social and medical problems, and diagnoses. Many systems can be used for prescribing and dispensing and for administrative purposes such as making appointments, doing accounts, and word processing. Some offer the addi? tional facilities of audit and analysis of the practice activities. All of the systems are protected by pass? words to ensure security of the data. Some of the main functions available in the different systems are described below. The table gives a summary of the information that we collected.

Programming languages for library and textual processing

This paper aims to bridge the digital divide in Malawi's primary and secondary schools by developing Chich++, a simple console-based programming language in Chichewa (Nyanja). The goal is to teach fundamental programming and computational concepts to children and adults, especially those with limited English proficiency. Inspired by countries like Germany, China, and Japan, which teach IT in native languages, this initiative seeks to provide Malawian students with culturally and linguistically relevant programming education. By using Chichewa, Chich++ aims to democratize programming education and empower individuals to contribute to Malawi's socio-economic development. To achieve this vision, the paper utilizes a combination of powerful tools and resources. Java is the foundational programming language used for developing Chich++ and its infrastructure, building on the Java Interpreter Structure. Additionally, a graphical editor is employed to create the language's lessons on a documentation panel, paired with a code editor and an output pane. Preliminary (desired) results indicate a suitable engagement theme and comprehensive way for students using Chich++ to understand basic coding and programming concepts, compared to those learning in English. Positive feedback highlights the potential impact on learning outcomes. To achieve this vision, the project utilizes a graphical editor that facilitates the construction of lessons, with a well-thought documentation area to enhance the learning experience.

Many people have wanted to do many things with OCLC‐MARC records. I would like to track the different kinds of bibliographic records processed by my cataloging staff so I can assign work to the professional and paraprofessional staff most efficiently. So, as the beginning of a management information system (MIS), I created Project Download, a microcomputer program that counts the number of bibliographic records that a holding library downloads from the OCLC Online Union Catalog and also enables me, as manager of the cataloging department, to count the materials coming from our acquisitions department. I gather the information using an M300 Workstation and process it on a Zenith 158 XT microcomputer that has a 10MB hard disk, using a microcomputer program called Smart to extract the data from the IBM environment and transform it into meaningful information in the Zenith environment. Smart is an integrated, fourth‐generation microcomputer software package with word processing, spreadsheet, graphics, communications, time management, and relational database management capabilities. Aldiough Smart doesn't require a hard disk, Project Download does in order to automatically pass data and control from module to module.

The intention of this article is to provide a summary of practical tips and useful guidelines on how to proceed when first using a hard disk. The basic setup of a hard disk drive is reviewed and examples for use in a medical reference department are given. A discussion of IBM's Fixed Disk Organizer program serves as an example in organizing the hard disk into subdirectories and utilizing various application programs such as word processors, spread sheets, graphics packages, communications software, and tutorials. Options for hard disk backup are included as well as an appendix that summarizes a number of DOS commands which are useful for managing files on the hard disk.

Programming Concepts. To build a knowledge base that captures the programmer's expertise, we first of all have to investigate the concepts and relations in the programming domain. The standard literature on programming presents concrete programming constructs and explains how these are used in solving concrete problems. But just like playing a good game of chess requires much more than knowing the rules of the game, writing a good program requires much more than knowing the syntax and semantics of the basic building blocks in a particular programming language. The novice programmer views a program as constructed out of the standard data types, primitive operations, and basic control structures available in a specific programming language such as number, list, sum, append, and the if-then-else construct. The expert programmer reasons with larger and less language-specific abstract programming concepts. He views a program as a configuration of larger units of data and computation. Typical examples of such units are abstract data types like sets, sequences and graphs, abstract operators like filter and select, and control abstractions like dolorall Cognitive studies (De Groot 1965; Larkin 1980) confronting experts and novices in various technical domains indicate the existence and importance of abstraction level(s). They show that experts develop and use 'chunks' that correspond to functional units in their domain while non experts do not. The experts perform better in their domain because of these abstractions. The same results have been obtained in the programming domain (Eisenstadt 1985; Soloway 1984; Adelson 1981). Chunks or functional units of composed data and/or computation are from this point on referred to as abstract programming concepts. Abstract programming concepts help the programmer to deal with complexity. They summarise a stereotypical combination of more primitive programming concepts which is instantiated to solve a particular problem. On the one hand, the large expert vocabulary reflects the programmer's knowledge about the abstract concepts used in programming. On the other hand, the existence of this vocabulary indicates the importance of such abstractions in communicating and organising programming knowledge. Abstract programming concepts act as loci of programming knowledge and the relations between them introduce structure into the large body of programming knowledge.programming concepts help the programmer to deal with complexity. They summarise a stereotypical combination of more primitive programming concepts which is instantiated to solve a particular problem. On the one hand, the large expert vocabulary reflects the programmer's knowledge about the abstract concepts used in programming. On the other hand, the existence of this vocabulary indicates the importance of such abstractions in communicating and organising programming knowledge. Abstract programming concepts act as loci of programming knowledge and the relations between them introduce structure into the large body of programming knowledge. SEQUENCE is a structured collective data structure can be typed can be ordered if the element type has an order relation defined on it can be implemented as a linear-list, a vector, ... has element selectors defined on it such as first, last, nth, . has selectors defined on it such as filter, butfirst,

In recent years, with the continuous advancement of technology, modern people live in the context of the digital age, they are proficient in various digital technologies, good at using mobile phones, computers, and smart home appliances, some people call them "digital natives". However, despite their familiarity with digital media, few can independently create new projects to solve life's problems. It’s as if they can read but don’t have the ability to write. Gradually, people began to realize the importance of programming languages. Programming education has become an important part of basic education, and more and more people are beginning to attach importance to computer science, programming logic, and computational thinking. Most countries have cultivated students' programming concepts from an early age, but programming languages begin to become abstract and difficult to understand when they reach a certain level. In high school, programming language courses are a difficult subject for many students. Generally, teaching aids are considered to enhance teaching effectiveness, promote learners’ cognition and make it easier to understand. That can help teachers express the content of the course more clearly when teaching. But sometimes, poorly designed teaching aids can become a more troublesome factor for teachers, such as delays in teaching time, leading to student misunderstandings or more problems, etc. Not every teaching aid is suitable as a classroom-aided learning tool. Therefore, this research will take the programming language courses of high school as the background, focus on the difficulties encountered by students in the classroom and design a set of interactive teaching aids “Pixel Button” for teaching algorithmic thinking. It is hoped that through Pixel Button, students' learning motivation and understanding will be enhanced.

Revision of FMM–Yukawa: An adaptive fast multipole method for screened Coulomb interactions