by Joseph Weizenbaum Since the dawn of the age of computers, people have cursed the difficulty of programming. Over and over again we encounter the suggestion that we should be able to communicate to a computer in natural language what we want it to do. Unfortunately, such advice rests upon a misconception of both the computer and its task. The computer might not be stupid, but it is stubborn. That is, the computer does what all the details of its pro gram command it to do, i. e. , what the programmer "tells" it to do. And this can be quite different from what the programmer intended. The misun derstanding with respect to tasks posed to the computer arises from the failure to recognize that such tasks can scarcely be expressed in natural language, if indeed at all. For example, can we practice music, chemistry or mathematics without their respective special symbolic languages? Yet books about computers and programming languages can be written more or less reasonably, even if they are not quite poetic or lyrical. This book can serve as an example of this art and as a model for anyone at tempting to teach inherently difficult subject matters to others. Klagenfurt, April 1995 Preface Striving to make learning to program easier, this book addresses primarily students beginning a computer science major. For our program examples, we employ a new, elegant programming language, Modula-3.

This book aims to provide a complete guide for programmers who want to learn how to write correct and maintainable programmes in the Modula-3 programming language - the newest member of the Pascal family of languages. The book describes the complete Modula-3 language, beginning with basics and progressing to more advanced features of the language. Coverage includes the basic language, declaration statements, types and procedures.

Accompanying CD-ROM contains ... "advanced/optional content, hundreds of working examples, an active search facility, and live links to manuals, tutorials, compilers, and interpreters on the World Wide Web."--Page 4 of cover.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the Joint Modular Languages Conference, JMLC'97, held in Linz, Austria, in March 1997. The 24 revised full papers presented were carefully selected from a total of 55 submissions; also included are full papers of two invited presentations. The book is devoted to languages, techniques, and tools for the development of modular, extensible, and type-safe software systems. Among the programming languages covered are Modula, Oberon, Ada95, Eiffel, Salher, Java, and others. The issues addressed include compiler technology, persistence, data structures, typing, distribution, active objects, real-time programming, inheritance, reflection, languages, etc.

Large-scale open distributed systems provide an infrastructure for assembling global applications on the basis of software and hardware components originating from multiple sources. Open systems rely on publicly available standards to permit heterogeneous components to interact. The Internet is the archetype of a large-scale open distributed system; standards such as HTTP, HTML, and XML, together with the widespread adoption of the Java language, are the cornerstones of many distributed systems. This book surveys security in large-scale open distributed systems by presenting several classic papers and a variety of carefully reviewed contributions giving the results of new research and development. Part I provides background requirements and deals with fundamental issues in trust, programming, and mobile computations in large-scale open distributed systems. Part II contains descriptions of general concepts, and Part III presents papers detailing implementations of security concepts.