While commercial CASE tools have developed extensions to the Ftite State Machine that can model any computable ftmction snd/or any parallel system, there has been no simple hand method with equivalent capabilities suitable for student use.'Ilk paper presents a simple object-oriented extension to Fhtite State Machines with the power of a Turing machine and the capability to model parallel processing.

As the use of Ada in commercial programming increases, it becomes more important to make an attempt to introduce it into the curriculum as early as possible.We have taught CS 1 successfully using Ada by strictly concentrating on a subset of the language and through the use of a studentoriented package which enables students to begin writing programs in Ada after one lecture.A laboratory of personal computers was found to be adequate for CS 1 use and students were able to write up to 2 programs per week in the course,

A classification method for parallel sorting architectures is presented for comparison of existing designs. Some common drawbacks of these parallel sorters are noted: in general, they are limited by their data accessing mechanism, their hardware utilization is low, and their sorting speed is in some sense independent of the number of sorting elements used in the architecture. In this paper we present a detailed design and analysis of distributor based sorters (parallel balanced tree sorters) which can sort lists whose size is proportional to the memory space available and whose speed is proportional to the number of sorting elements used.

The recently proposed curricula for a master's degree present problems for a department with limited resources. This paper discusses the proposed curricula, their goals and problems, and then presents a new curriculum based upon a set of core courses. The new curriculum simultaneously satisfies two of the proposed curricula, yet imposes lower demands upon the department's resources.

Primitive recursion, recursion and partial recursion are defined for languages which query a relational data base. Necessary and sufficient conditions for a language to satisfy these properties are given. The computational power of several extensions of the relational algebra is considered.

A step-by-step presentation for the introductory computer science course which introduces the student to structured problem solving has been developed. By emphasizing the importance of “finding the pattern” and developing sequential algorithms from a top-down point of view, the students seem to have a better grasp on how to solve a problem, how to use a language, and how to apply what they have learned to later courses which use the computer.

Maintaining access efficiency to a data base as updates and/or usage patterns change often requires restructuring the data base. While analytical methods are available for determining the optimal point to restructure, they assume the mean access cost is a smooth function of time or the number of accesses and can be measured exactly at any point in time. The access cost in practice often varies, at least in the short run, In a random manner. This implies a nonzero probability of deciding the optimal reorganization point has been reached when in fact it has not. Determination of the optimal reorganization point must take into account the random behavior of the access cost and the probability (and cost) of deciding too early or too late to perform the reorganization. A technique for choosing the optimal reorganization point subject to random variation in the access cost is developed and some examples are presented.