@inproceedings{hopper_interlude_1956,
	address = {Washington, {D.C.}},
	title = {The Interlude 1954-1956},
	language = {English},
	booktitle = {Symposium on Advanced Programming Methods for Digital Computers: Washington, {D.C.}, June 28, 29, 1956},
	publisher = {Office of Naval Research, Dept. of the Navy},
	author = {Hopper, Grace M.},
	year = {1956},
	pages = {1--2}
}

Precis 1

In her remarks opening the conference Hopper 1956 looked back at the 1954 symposium on Automatic Programming for Digital Computers also sponsored by the Office of Naval Research. “That automatic coding is accepted and operating today,” Hopper 1956 concluded, “is due in large part to the information and encouragement received at the previous symposium” (2).

Hopper 1956 also remarked on the warnings made by various attendees of the 1954 symposium about the dangers of excessive pseudocode complexity, observing that “‘Too many subroutines’ has been answered by the use of generators,” while “[t]he answer to the criticism of ‘too complex pseudocodes’ has been the use of normal mathematical symbology and English words” (2).

Precis 2

In “The Interlude 1954-1956,” Grace Murray Hopper reviewed definitions of “basic types of routines involved in automatic coding” [@hopper_interlude_1956, 1], drawing them from the Association for Computing Machinery Glossary.

  1. Pseudocode was defined as “arbitrary instruction code, independent of the hardware and computer, which must be translated into computer code if it is to direct the computer through a series of operations [@hopper_interlude_1956, 1].
  2. A converter changed “information from one notation to another”: “alphanumeric data into numeric, decimal information into binary, or fixed-point into floating-point data” [@hopper_interlude_1956, 1].

All the other definitions were of routines that operated directly on pseudocode:

  1. An interpreter translated pseudocode into computer code in the process of computation, processing subroutines as they are translated [@hopper_interlude_1956, 1].
  2. A generator used “stored skeletal coding” to produce units of pseudocode customized to the parameters desired for the particular problem [@hopper_interlude_1956, 1].
  3. An assembler translated units of pseudocode into “a complete running program” [@hopper_interlude_1956, 1].
  4. A compiler translated pseudocode into computer code (or into another pseudocode) before the primary process of computation begins, although the compiling process may involve the computational processing of converting, generating, interpreting, and/or assembling routines in and of itself [@hopper_interlude_1956, 1].