This paper presents an approach to meeting the academic objectives of advanced software engineering project courses. The objectives are increased competence and confidence of the students in carrying out software development projects. The academic context includes a simulated industrial context. Part of the industrial context consists of industrial roles played for the student team by the instructor and others. The project itself is divided into tasks related to deliverables and collateral responsibilities. The software production model is a combination of the waterfall, iterative enhancement, and document-driven techniques. A software development environment is mentioned although the details are presented elsewhere. Further detail is given for five project courses conducted by the author.

Wirth (1971) has proposed a method of `stepwise refinement' for writing computer programs. This paper proposes that the steps be expressed as proofs. A program for the eight queens problem is developed, and the proof method is applied across two of the steps of the development. The strengths and weaknesses of the method, and its implications for the programming process and programming language design are discussed.

The advent of microprogramming is likely to cause a major change in the way we use computers. The reason is that it provides a nearly complete decoupling between the efforts of computer design engineers and programmers. When the engineers provide a microcode that can be changed under program control, they will be able to pass on to the programmer a major portion of the design of the machine instruction set. The question is what the programmers will do with it when they get it.

Real numbers can be represented in a binary computer by the form i-Bewhere i is the integer part, B the base, and e the exponent. The accuracy of the representation will depend upon the number of bits allocated to the integer part and exponent part as well as what base is chosen. If L(i) and L(e) are the number of bits allocated to the magnitudes of the integer and exponent parts and we define I= 2L(i)and E = 2L(e), the exponent range is given by B±E, the maximum relative representation error is given by B/2I, and the average relative representation error is given by (B-1)/(4I 1n B). The formulas provide quantitative comparison for the effectiveness of alternative formats for real number representations.