I owe many ideas and views expressed in this book to discussions with my collaborators at ETH.5 Algorithms and Data Structures© N. This book is a condensation (and at the same timean elaboration) of several courses on programming taught at the Federal Institute of Technology (ETH)at Zürich. In short, the subjects of program compositionand data structures are inseparably interwined. It made clear that decisions about structuring data cannot be made without knowledge of the algorithms applied to the data and that, vice versa, the structure and choice of algorithms often depend strongly on the structure of the underlying data. An outstanding contribution to bring order into the bewildering variety of terminology and concepts on data structures was made by Hoare through his Notes on Data Structuring. Programs, after all, are concreteformulations of abstract algorithms based on particular representations and structures of data.
Hence, a methodology of programming is also bound to include all aspects of data structuring. Yet, it is abundantly clear that a systematic and scientific approach toprogram construction primarily has a bearing in the case of large, complex programs which involve complicated sets of data. These papers focused their attention on the aspects of composition and analysis of programs, or more explicitly, on the structure of algorithms represented by program texts.
Both these papers argue convincingly that many programmming errors can be prevented by making programmers aware of the methods and techniques which they hitherto applied intuitively and often unconsciously. Hoare's Axiomatic Basis of Computer Programming showed in a lucid manner that programs are amenable to an exacting analysis based on mathematical reasoning. Dijkstra's Notes on Structured Programming opened a new view of programming as a scientif ic subject and intellectual challenge, and it coined the title for a "revolution" in programming. The initial outstanding contributions toward this development were made by E.W. It has advanced from a craft to an academic discipline. In recent years the subject of computer programminghas been recognized as a discipline whose mastery is fundamental and crucial to the success of many engineering projects and which is amenable to scientific treatement and presentation.
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