In their 1977 work "The Early Development of Programming Languages", Trabb Pardo and Knuth introduced a trivial program which involved arrays, indexing, mathematical functions, subroutines, I/O, conditionals and iteration. They then wrote implementations of the algorithm in several early programming languages to show how such concepts were expressed.

The simpler Hello world program has been used for much the same purpose.

The algorithm

ask for 11 numbers into sequence S

reverse sequence S

for each item in sequence S

    do an operation

    if result overflows

        alert user

    else

        print result

The algorithm reads eleven numbers from an input device, stores them in an array, and then processes them in reverse order, applying a user-defined function to each value and reporting either the value of the function or a message to the effect that the value has exceeded some threshold.

Implementations

ALGOL 60

   begin integer i; real y; real array a[0:10];

   real procedure f(t); real t; value t;

     f := sqrt(abs(t))+5*t^3;

   for i := 0 step 1 until 10 do read(a[i]);

   for i := 10 step -1 until 0 do

     begin y := f(a[i]);

           if y > 400 then write(i, "TOO LARGE")

           else write(i,y);

     end

   end

The problem with the usually specified function is that the term 5*t^3 gives overflows in almost all languages for very large negative values.

Ruby version

class TPK

 def f(x )

   return Math.sqrt(x.abs) + 5*x **3

 end

 def main

     y = f(x)

   end

 end

Ruby handles numerical overflow by returning Infinity, which is greater than 400.

Ocaml version

let tpk =

  let f x = sqrt x +. 5.0 *. (x ** 3.0) in

  let pr f = print_endline (if f > 400.0 then "overflow" else string_of_float f) in

  let read = float_of_string (read_line ()) in

  let a = Array.init 11 (fun _ -> read ()) in

  for i = 10 downto 0 do

    pr (f a.(i))

  done

A functional version can also be written in Ocaml:

let tpk l =

 let f x = sqrt x +. 5.0 *. (x ** 3.0) in

 let p x = x < 400.0 in

   List.filter p (List.map f (List.rev l))

References

• "The Early Development of Programming Languages" in A History of Computing in the Twentieth Century, New York, Academic Press, 1980. ISBN 0-12-491650-3 (Reprinted in Knuth, Donald E., et al, Selected Papers on Computer Languages, Stanford, CA, CSLI, 2003. ISBN 1-57586-382-0)

External links

• Implementations in several modern languages