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Ask HN: What is your favorite CS paper?

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Re: Ask HN: What is your favorite CS paper?

#65

Cheney on the MTA http://home.pipeline.com/~hbaker1/CheneyMTA.html Full tail recursion scheme implementation by never "return" in C

Such a great hack. Not only tail recursion but a complete GC implementation in (almost) platform-independent generated C code.

Re: Ask HN: What is your favorite CS paper?

#66
Olin Shivers's work on various control flow analyses, in particular the paper "CFA2: a context-free approach to control-flow analysis", is a really cool static analysis via abstract interpretation. Matt Might had a bunch of papers in a similar vein.

Re: Ask HN: What is your favorite CS paper?

#69

The Scheme papers are great http://library.readscheme.org/page1.html "On the Translation of Languages from Left to Right", by Knuth, I found much clearer and more illuminating than any of the secondary literature on LR(k) parsing.

I recall finding "Lambda: The Ultimate GOTO" to be mind-bending.

Re: Ask HN: What is your favorite CS paper?

#70
The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine, by Brin and Page.

Not only for the historical value of changing the world, and for the fact that it's very interesting and readable; It has personal value to me: the first CS paper I've ever read and it inspired me and changed the course of my life, literally.

Also, it has some very amusingly naive (in hindsight) stuff in it, like: "Google does not have any optimizations such as query caching, subindices on common terms, and other common optimizations. We intend to speed up Google considerably through distribution and hardware, software, and algorithmic improvements. Our target is to be able to handle several hundred queries per second"

http://infolab.stanford.edu/~backrub/google.html

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