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by jhgb
1738 days ago
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> because Babbage and Menabrea had previously created a few simple example programs. That almost sounds to me like saying that the Wright brothers "made a few simple flights". > first to invent foundational control flow structures such as loops I wonder how sigma notation fits into this. Clearly the notion of expressing arbitrarily repeated operations using a fixed amount of information (which is what a loop is, essentially) was known at least to Euler. Also, the fact that the machine enabled these things in the first place (unlike even some of the later machines such as Z3) suggests that its designer was either aware of this necessity to begin with, or at the very least in possession of preternatural prescience. In that case the use of these features in some programs but not in others would be not a matter of inventing them in the former programs but instead a matter of choosing to exploit existing hardware features, or declining to do so, depending on what program you're looking at. |
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You can even go further back. Algorithms with loops were known already to Babylonian mathematicians. So you don't need to resort to preternatural prescience.
The Z3 was not intended as a general computing device but as a practical help for engineers. Because of that you can't say it was missing something it didn't need to do its job. Whereas when Zuse designed Plankalkül loops and conditional branches where naturally included in the design.