Abstract
The importance of subroutines as a way of enabling code reuse was clear to von Neumann from the beginning of his work on the EDVAC code. However, the need for subroutines to be relocatable within EDVAC’s memory raised technical issues that the users of earlier machines had not had to face. This chapter examines how Goldstine and von Neumann’s ideas about subroutines evolved over the period of writing the Planning and Coding reports, examining the role of subroutines in the process of program design, the representation of subroutines on flow diagrams, and the practical issues involved in the use of a subroutine library. Their approach is contrasted with the better-known proposals formulated for the EDSAC machine in Cambridge.
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Notes
- 1.
A subroutine in which the order of interpolation N was also a run-time parameter would have required a different amount of numerical storage each time it was called, introducing complications that Goldstine and von Neumann apparently chose not to entertain.
- 2.
The same perspective appears in the very influential description of the EDSAC programming system in the book by Wilkes et al. (1951).
- 3.
Julian Rohrhuber (2018) has written on the status of functions in a wide range of computational formalisms, and I am grateful to him for drawing my attention to Strachey’s comment. On the face of it an odd description to use of a technical concept in an obscure programming language, the phrase ‘second-class citizens’ had considerable currency in the UK media at the time and was particularly associated with the treatment of immigrant communities such as the ‘Kenyan Asians’ (Winder 2005).
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Priestley, M. (2018). Subroutines. In: Routines of Substitution. SpringerBriefs in History of Computing. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91671-2_6
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91671-2_6
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