Bertrand Meyer's technology+ blog
Software engineering, programming methodology, languages, verification, general technology, publication culture, and more
The 2013 Informatics Europe “Best Practices in Education” award was devoted, this year, to initiatives for teaching informatics in schools [1]. It was given out last week at the European Computer Science Summit in Amsterdam [2]. Two teams shared it, one from Poland and the other from Romania. Both teams showed excellent projects, but the … Read more
I have mentioned this paper before but as a draft. It has now been accepted by ACM’s Computing Surveys and is scheduled to appear in September 2014; the current text, revised from the previous version, is available [1]. Here is the abstract: Software verification has emerged as a key concern for ensuring the continued … Read more
For various reasons there have been no articles in recent weeks; now we are restarting on a regular basis! A the first topic for this new season, here is a little quiz. I have a function: For 0 it yields 0. For 1 it yields 1. For 2 it yields 4. For 3 it yields … Read more
The resources we have at our disposal on a computing system may be huge, but they are always finite, and our programs’ appetite for resources will eventually exhaust them. At that stage, we have to deal with the SBYBAW rule, which sounds like a tautology but is an encouragement to look for clever algorithms: techniques for freeing resources when no resources remain may not request new resources.