Early Programming Books

[ben]

On 2021-06-20 6:57 a.m., Toby Thain via cctech wrote:
> On 2021-06-20 1:39 p.m., Paul Birkel via cctech wrote:
>> Dave;
>>
>> I'm much more curious about programming books that were *not* machine
>> specific.
>> That is, about "general principles" of designing/preparing software for
>> execution.
> 
> Not sure if it's what you are looking for, but if you haven't, check out
> "Classic Operating Systems" by Per Brinch Hansen.
> 
>>
>> Of course, one needs a language; McCracken (1957) defines TYDAC.
>> Much later (1968) Knuth defines MIX.
>>
>> In between perhaps one could argue that ALGOL 58 qualifies as such a
>> language-for-demonstration, but I don't believe that there were any books
>> specifically about programming in ALGOL 58.  I presume that there were
>> eventually such books for ALGOL 60.
> 
> Pretty sure I own one, by Dijkstra. Will get details later if you are
> interested.
> 
> --Toby

I suspect after 1958 people stopped thinking of real world programming
problems. All the general programming books, seem to want to get rid of
the "goto" or have Strange-multi-level variables or procedures or just
use unbounded memory. Operating system books have chapters about some
logic construct only to state later in the book, "That does not apply
to this system setup".
My latest gripe, is I still am looking for a algorithm to generate
code for a single accumulator machine for an arithmetic expression.
Parenthesis need to evaluated first and temporary variables allotted, 
thus a two pass algorithm. Everything is single pass. Recursive decent
can parse but can't generate 'correct' code. A-(B+C) is LD B ADD C ST T1 
LD A SUB T1, not LD A ST T1 LD B ST T2 LD C ADD T2 NEGATE ADD T1
Ben.