IBM 610 workstation computer 3394

Morten Reistad

It's not as easy as it sounds. In computer usage, the "what" and "how" get blurred together. No matter what approach is used, the final instructions a human gives a computer must have no ambiguity to it. That requires a coding structure of some sort.

I have a column of numbers and I want the mean and median averages from them. What exactly is the "what" and the "how" to accomplish this? How would that be coded clearly without ambiguity and easily?

We know how to do this in buttembler. We know how to do this in COBOL or Fortran and know it would be easier. Easier still is a spreadsheet program since much of the manual definition effort is automated. We don't have to define where decimal points are, where the list ends, how to calculate a mean or median since it's all there automatically.

Now obviously in some cases it may be better to do this work by COBOL or FORTRAN or by pencil and paper.

Computers are so fast these days that worrying about the "hardware of the day" isn't as important unless it's a specialized highly intensive number crunching application.

Indeed, what language do they use to program applications than run on the "supercomputers"? (The Cray boxes, "big blue", etc.)