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DEATH OF EDSGER DIJKSTRA

Brian Grainger

I apologise that this is not really news in the normal sense, as it happened some time before October 2002. Nevertheless, I claim Editorial licence as it is news to our community and I have not seen it reported widely. Indeed, I only caught it in a trade paper for professional programmers.

Who was Edsger Dijkstra? Those of you who have been with ICPUG since the days when I wrote about COMAL will probably know. He was the father of the technique of 'Structured Programming'. In the early days of home computers, when all the hobbyists were programming their hex to decimal conversion routines, he famously declared, 'BASIC is crap'!

Because of the use of GOTO, and other constructs which allowed code execution to jump around, Dijkstra declared that it was too easy to make mistakes in BASIC programming and put forward his proposals on Structured Programming.

COMAL was developed specifically to take into account Dijkstra's proposals and over time most forms of BASIC, as well as macro languages and the like, had structured constructs.

Dijkstra had a knack for clarity of expression. His BASIC statement is pretty basic, after all! In his book, 'Notes on Structured Programming', he reminded readers that if one program item had a probability, p, of being correct then n such items together had a probability of pⁿ of being correct.

Translate that to a computer program with half a million lines of code. If each line has a 0.999999 chance of success then the whole program only has a 0.6, or 60%, chance of success. Now you know why Windows fails!

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