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Communications of the ACM

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President's letter: on spending our time wisely


Some practical experience with a software quality assurance program

Within a production programming environment, a software quality assurance program (QAP) was instituted to produce standards, conventions, and methodologies for all phases of the software development process. Software language …

DIAGRAM: a grammar for dialogues

An explanatory overview is given of DIAGRAM, a large and complex grammar used in an artificial intelligence system for interpreting English dialogue. DIAGRAM is an augmented phrase-structure grammar with rule procedures that  …

Generating gamma variates by a modified rejection technique

A suitable square root transformation of a gamma random variable with mean a ≥ 1 yields a probability density close to the standard normal density. A modification of the rejection technique then begins by sampling from the normal …

Control flow and data structure documentation: two experiments

Two experiments were carried out to assess the utility of external documentation aids such as macro flowcharts, pseudocode, data structure diagrams, and data structure descriptions. A 223 line Pascal program which manipulates …

Approximation algorithms for convex hulls


ACM Forum


NSF meeting on national security controls on science and engineering


The new (1982) Computing Reviews classification system—final version