Apnea Coding

This program is a simple demonstration for illustrating how classic declarative programming can provide very intuitive and compact solution generators for logic problems and combinatorial tasks. In this example, a set of bricks with three sizes and a stability constraint ("do not put larger above") is coded to provide solution searching on all possible ways to build a stable tower of a specific height. Prolog's main advantage over other declarative programming languages is that even in the early '80s came with a rich library of common functionalities that made real-world application development easy. Turbo Prolog was probably the best option for PC machines, with efficient memory enhancements via more strict typing and other syntax shortcuts to limit the tree search in manageable space/time requirements for these platforms. Although now depricated by constrained and fuzzy logic paradigms, Prolog-style programming is still the most intuitive way to design simple expe

This program is a simple demonstration of basic user I/O and arithmetic operations in one of the earliest versions of COBOL that was made available for home computers in the early '80s. The "executable" was actually an intermediate binary format created as the compiler output, which could then be executed by another program, not very differently than today's Just-In-Time (JIT) compilers or pre-compiled interpreted languages. The language is the creation of Grace Hopper, a pivotal figure in the evolution of programming and the design of the first trully general-purpose languages. The two main strengths of COBOL was the rich I/O functionality for data file handling and the screen handling routines for creating terminal-based user I/O via forms and tables. Although functionally limited and with loquacious syntax by the programming standards of later language generations, COBOL was deemed extremely reliable and understandable by the programmers of those early days. So m

Pseudo-random number generator function in retro Fortran no-talking, in emulated 80286 / MS-DOS machine in DOSbox. This program implements a pseudo-random number generator (PRNG) by using the classic Mixed-Congruential Sequence (linear) method, as it was described by D. Knuth (1972) regarding proper parameter choices for high-entropy output. The general rules for parameter choice are: M (modulo) must be at most half the available bits width of the integer type used. C (increment) should be chosen close to the value: M * (1/2 - sqrt(3)/6) = 0.2113248654051871... For example: M=2^8 gives C=54 (54.09916...) A (multiplier) should be chosen as to satisfy the following three requirements: A mod 8 = 5 , A between M/100 and M-sqrt(M) , A must not have trivial bit pattern value. Then these three values, along with a user-provided seed value X0, can be used iteratively with: X(n+1) = (A * X(n) + C) mod M , X(0)=X0. Provided that all constraints are satisfied, there are various