From: utzoo!decvax!watmath!jcwinterton Newsgroups: net.followup Title: Re: Dr. D., math, etc. Article-I.D.: watmath.2387 Posted: Wed May 12 12:40:44 1982 Received: Thu May 13 03:42:23 1982 References: ihuxn.121 Well! Considering the mail I got, I feel that clarification is necessary. I do not believe that math consists only of Combinatorics and Optimization (counting and doing it well). Mathematical thought is so close to philosophical thought that they become hard to separate especially when logic is involved. The word "algorithm" is tossed around with great glee by many people, but only mathematicians, programmers and philosophers seem to use it in its exact sense of "a method of doing something". You will notice that in the last sentence I differentiate between mathematicians and programmers. I do believe that programming is somewhat mathematical, but I do not believe that all mathematicians are programmers. My general approach to learning computer languages and writing analyzers for some of the small ones I have been involved with has been formal of late, but when I started out brute force was used. (It turns out that I actually discovered recursive descent parsing on my own.) WRT DJ Molny, software creation is not engineering either. In fact, it is multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary. Like the "real" engineering crowd a hundred years ago, we are at the threshold of defining either a scientific art or an artistic science, where the mechanical is the result of the creative and esthetic. If programming were a science, there would be only one way to program something, and the methods would produce repeatable results every time. Clearly this is nonesense. What this discipline needs is the "one machine architecture" which would then make it unnecessary to worry about efficient code generators for it would happen once and for all time. Similarly, if there were only one machine, we would only need one machine-oriented language. Under those rather stifling conditions, programming could become a science? John Winterton.