SCOUG-Programming Mailing List Archives

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Date:	Thu, 17 Apr 2003 17:05:35 PDT7
From:	"Lynn H. Maxson" <lmaxson@pacbell.net >
Reply-To:	scoug-programming@scoug.com
To:	< "scoug-programming@scoug.com" > scoug-programming@scoug.com >
Subject:	SCOUG-Programming: permutation

Content Type: text/plain

"I wrote a quick (15 minutes) and dirty (tested only up
to 4 elements) permutation function using APL2. I will
bring it Saturday and run it if anyone is interested."

Most certainly. We can transfer it to the presentation machine
and you can present it.

"Thanks. Unfortunately I won't be at the Saturday meeting.

- Peter"

Fortunately the Programming SIG will be there. Peter, we will
try to carry on until you have a chance to join in our effort.

The peg solitaire provides an algorithmic example of an
exhaustive true/false proof process. You should note that the
permutation solution provides yet another. At some point you
should ask yourself why we do not use these forms as well as
others as part of formal testing. If we did so, we would find
beta testing and beta testers, both for the purpose of finding
something we might have missed in our own testing,
unnecessary.

While the exhaustive true/false proof is integral to the
two-stage proof process of logic programming, i.e. fourth
generation languages in general, nothing prevents its
application in non-logic programming applications, e.g.
imperative or third-generation languages. It's simply software
as well as making a decision to incorporate it within an
implementation.

For that matter nothing prevents us from incorporating the
first stage, the completeness proof, of the two-stage proof
process. In fact we have proposed doing this by eliminating
the use of internal procedures and allowing the procedures
associated with an application to appear in any order, i.e.
unordered, on input. In either instance we allow the software
to perform the clerical tasks that we now expend much time
doing and redoing manually.

Remember we want people to do what software cannot and
software what people need not. The more clerical effort we
can assign to the software the less manual effort we will
expend on input to get the same or greater output. That, my
friends, results in increased productivity. When that increase
approaches fifty times, a number considered up to now as
impossible, that brings software costs down correspondingly.
More importantly for open source it increases the individual
scope for application size by the same amount. Somewhere
before we get to that number our application size will include
an operating system like OS/2. At that point open source
comes closer to meeting its promise of individual
independence.

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