Letters between Backus and Dijkstra (1979)

Yes exactly, that's my position.

I feel that doctors are overworked generally, don't sleep very much so it's not surprising they don't have the time for introspection on this subject. The error rate is probably largely caused by economic factors like the perpetual labour shortage (in Ireland/UK at least).

On a personal level my grandmother had her pelvis snapped by doctors.

http://www.irishcentral.com/news/irish-woman-awarded-600000-...

In my own experience with a (not life threatening) medical procedure I went to three different doctors asking for help. None was given. They ignored my requests for analysis and a solution. I didn't even know what was wrong.

Finally I went online, found out what the problem was about, found out what the solution could be for it, and then I literally took a flight to England to get an experienced medical practitioner to sort it out which he did very professionally for a reasonable fee.

After this I complained to the medical ombudsman. Only then did they get into a flutter after literally years of waiting for them to solve the problem. A solution was provided that I no longer needed and I told them so. In fact I had already told them so but they weren't paying much attention. Pretty sure I could have sued them into the ground for malpractice.

I work with a coworker who broke his ankle falling down from a ladder. A horrible injury that shattered. That didn't even turn out to be the real problem though because after going into the hospital a doctor didn't wash his hands, and put them into the wound, infecting it with MRSA. My coworker who was awake, literally asked him to wash his hands right there and the doctor said "No, it's Ok".

I'm just one guy in his twenties and I can think of 3 cases like this. That is not good!

Lastly on an optimistic note my uncle fell off a roof he was working on with roof tiling. He fell two stories and behind him a trolley containing roof tiles slipped down and onto his back, almost snapping his spine in two.

The doctors fixed him up with steel plates, taking them out years later. Now he walks around like nothing happened (still on roofs!) but it's an amazing feat of medical attention to detail that this is true given his spinal column was almost severed.

Backhouse's less playful book covers the same topic, but has some more programming examples:

* cyclic code error correction * simple sorting algorithms * real number to integer conversion is used to introduce Galois connections

Again, this isn't a lot in terms of "practical examples". No production level software is built here. If you're looking for that sort of stuff, maybe you want to try out L. Lamport's book: http://www.amazon.com/Specifying-Systems-Language-Hardware-E...

I haven't read that book though.

I was surprised to discover recently that the word 'array' prior to 1950 was used exclusively to describe two dimensional tables of numbers that one might find in a matrix or determinant. But by the advent of FORTRAN I in 1957 and ALGOL 58, 'array' now referred exclusively to a one-dimensional entity, as compared with 'n-dimensional arrays'. I was interested in digging through John Backus's papers from this era to see if I could find any clues.

I was able to narrow down the near window to 1952-1954, since the FORTRAN preliminary report of 1954 uses the word 'array' casually in the modern one-dimensional sense as interchangeable with 'subscripted variables', the latter being the more common terminology at the time. By comparison, a virtually unknown paper by Rutishauser in 1952 describing the "for" loop did not use the word 'array' at all, only 'subscripted variables'. (Rutishauser was an accomplished mathematician and quite possibly the world's first computational scientist.) A paper by Laning and Zierler at MIT in 1954 describing a formula compiler also used only the term 'subscripted variables'.

Backus's papers also have evidence showing that FORTRAN I was clearly written specifically to take advantage of the IBM 704's machine capabilities. Not only was the IBM 704 the world's first commercially successful computer, it was also an improvement over the preceding IBM 701 in providing index registers (3 of them) and floating point instructions which were fast for its era. Backus's papers describe how providing hardware support for indexing and floating point was revolutionary, as all programs up to that time had to write in all these instructions by hand (and for many programs was pretty much all they did).

So it is clear to me now that the changeover in the implied dimensionality of the word 'array' must be related to how the array developed as a data structure abstracting away indexing operations. By the time IAL (pre-ALGOL) came on the scene in 1958, the idea of indexable homogeneous containers was already well established. But I still haven't found any strong smoking gun evidence introducing the one-dimensional sense of the word. I suspect further digging into the description of the IBM 704 may be necessary. The 704 was not the first to provide index registers, but it may have been the first to call them as such. (The Manchester Mark I computer of 1948 appears to be the first computer with an index register, but it was called a B line. The [patent](https://www.google.com/patents/US3012724) claiming to cover index registers uses the term "control instruction" - no arrays mentioned - but it very cutely describes numbers as residing in known locations or "addresses" in quotes.)