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Update plans: pointers in teaching computer architecture

Published: 26 May 2002 Publication History

Abstract

Pointers are intrinsic to Computer Science. Each field of Computer Science seems to use its own more or less ad hoc notation for describing pointers and operations on pointers, thus impeding crossover of students' skills from one area to another.
This paper describes Update Plans, a "universal" pointer specification language, and its application to teaching Computer Architectures. Consistent use of Update Plans as a supplement to traditional notations can greatly enhance students' ability to apply skills learned in Computer Architecture courses to other pointer applications, and this is also illustrated.

References

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Hugh Osborne. Update Plans. In Proceedings of the 25th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences. IEEE Computer Society Press, 1992.
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Hugh Osborne. Update Plans -- A High Level Low Level Specification Language. PhD thesis, University of Nijmegen, Toernooiveld 1, Nijmegen, The Netherlands, 1994.
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Hugh Osborne. Update Plans for parallel architectures. In M. Kara, J. R. Davy, D. Goodeve, and J. Nash, editors, Abstract Machine Models for Parallel and Distributed Computing, pages 79--90, Amsterdam, 1996. IOS Press.
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Hugh Osborne. The Postroom Computer: Teaching introductory undergraduate computer architecture. In Proceedings of the 33rd ACM Technical Symposium on Computer Science Education (SIGCSE 2002), 2002.
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Simon Peyton Jones. The Implementation of Functional Programming Languages. Prentice Hall, 1987.
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Hans Meijer. Programmar: A Translator Generator. PhD thesis, University of Nijmegen, Toernooiveld 1, Nijmegen, The Netherlands, 1986.
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William Yurcik and Hugh Osborne. A crowd of Little Man Computers: Visual computer simulator teaching tools. In Proceedings of 2001 Winter Simulation Conference, New York, 2001. ACM.

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cover image ACM Other conferences
WCAE '02: Proceedings of the 2002 workshop on Computer architecture education: Held in conjunction with the 29th International Symposium on Computer Architecture
May 2002
128 pages
ISBN:9781450347310
DOI:10.1145/1275462
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 26 May 2002

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