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Advances in COMPUTERS VOLUME 7 Contributors to This Volume WILLIAMR. BOZMAN WAYNEA. DANIELSON RUTHM. DAVIS JOHN C. MURTHA ARNOLD C. SATTERTHWAIT ANDRIESVAN DAM Advances in COMPUTERS EDITED BY FRANZ L. ALT National Bureau of Standards Washington D.C. AND MORRIS RUBINOFF University of Pennsylvania and Pennsylvania Research Associates Philadelphia, Pennsylvania VOLUME 7 ACADEMIC PRESS New York . London-1966 COPYRIGHT0 1 9 6 6 BY ACADEMICPRESS INC. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. NO PART O F THIS BOOK MAY B E REPRODUCED I N ANY FORM, BY PHOTOSTAT, MICROFILM, OR ANY OTHER MEANS, WITHOUT WRITTEN PERMISSION FROM THE PUBLISHERS. ACADEMIC PRESS INC. 11 1 Fifth Avenue, New York, New York 10003 United Kingdom Edition published by ACADEMIC PRESS INC. (LONDON) LTD, Berkley Square House, London W. 1 LIBRARY OF CONGRESSCATALOGCARDNUMBER:59-15761 PRINTED I N THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA Contributors to Volume 7 WILLIAM R. BOZMAN, National Bureau of Standards, Washington, D.C. WAYNEA. DANIELSON, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, North Carolina RUTHM. DAVIS,Ofice of Director of Defense Research and Engineering, Department of Defense, Washington, D.C. JOHNC. MURTHA,Westinghouse Electric Corporation, Baltimore, Maryland ARNOLDC. SATTERTHWAIT, Program in Information Science, Washingt m State University, Pullman, Washington ANDRIESVAN DAM,Moore School of Electrical Engineering, University of Pennsylvania, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania V This Page Intentionally Left Blank Preface As the third generation of computers begins to make its impact felt on the business and technological world, the time has come for a broad review of the recent developments in computer hardware and software that have contributed t o the new generation. The current volume of Advances in Computers accordingly presents a comprehensive critical review of programming language processors, a detailed review and evaluation of hardware systems with multiple cooperating digital and/or analog processing units, and an up-to-the-minute description of computer-driven displays and their use in real-time on-line man-machine problem solving, The review will continue in Volume 8 with a survey and detailed discussion of time-sharing systems and the various means by which these systems are designed to accommodate large numbers of remote users in a seemingly simultaneous mode. In this volume, the article by Ruth Davis on programming language processors carefully delineates their common theoretical and conceptual foundations and bridges the gap between mathematical linguistics and programming language processor design. The author points t o the attention paid to syntax and pragmatics through the use of unambiguous vocabularies and structures, and the formal specification of actions to be executed by the computer. She notes, however, that semantics is either nonexistent or artificially introduced in programming language processors to date. A discussion of the historical development and current features of these processors is followed by enumeration of measurement criteria for their analytic evaluation. A companion article by Arnold Satterthwait discusses several specific programming systems in the U.S.A. which have been directed toward machine translation studies. Thesc systems include COMIT, MIMIC, the Wayne system, SNOBOL, and LRS ; the article provides detailed descriptions and illustrative applications of each of them. In John Murtha’s article on highly parallel computer complexes, he distinguishes among memory-organized, nctwork, and multiple-computer systems. He discusses parallel network complexes with many identical processors and a single central control, such as the Unger and Solomon systems, and contrasts them with distributed control netwo