Niklaus Wirth is one of the great pioneers of computer technology and winner of the ACM's A.M. Turing Award, the most prestigious award in computer science. he has made substantial contributions to the development of programming languages, compiler construction, programming methodology, and hardware design. While working at ERH Zurich, he developed the languages Pascal and Modula-2. He also designed an early high performance workstation, the Personal Computer Lilith, and most recently the language and operating system Oberon.
While Wirth has often been praised for his excellent work as a...

by Joseph Weizenbaum Since the dawn of the age of computers, people have cursed the difficulty of programming. Over and over again we encounter the suggestion that we should be able to communicate to a computer in natural language what we want it to do. Unfortunately, such advice rests upon a misconception of both the computer and its task. The computer might not be stupid, but it is stubborn. That is, the computer does what all the details of its pro gram command it to do, i. e., what the programmer "tells" it to do. And this can be quite different from what the programmer intended. The...

Die Schwierigkeit der Programmierung liegt darin, dass wir unsere Ideen in eine Form bringen mussen, die maschinell verarbeitet werden kann. Diese Umsetzung von Ideen in mechanische Form fallt oft schwer und kann den Anfanger entmutigen. Das Buch zeigt, wie durch richtige Strukturierung, durch die Ausbildung eines guten "Stils," auch komplexe Programme geschrieben und verstanden werden konnen. Dazu bedient es sich der Sprache Modula-3, die als Nachfolger von Pascal und Modula-2 auf den in diesen Sprachen bereits bewahrten Konzepten aufbaut und sie erweitert. Der dadurch ermoglichte...