Abstract
Let us follow the steps of development of a simple program and thereby explain some of the fundamental concepts of programming and of the basic facilities of Modula. The task shall be, given two natural numbers x and y, to compute their greatest common divisor (gcd). The mathematical knowledge needed for this problem is the following:
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1.
if x equals y, x (or y) is the desired result
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2.
the gcd of two numbers remains unchanged, if we replace the larger number by the difference of the numbers, i.e. subtract the smaller number form the larger one.
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© 1988 Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg
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Wirth, N. (1988). A First Example. In: Programming in Modula-2. Text and Monographs in Computer Science. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-83565-0_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-83565-0_2
Publisher Name: Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg
Print ISBN: 978-3-642-83567-4
Online ISBN: 978-3-642-83565-0
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