Excerpt from Combo: A General-Purpose Program for Searching, Annotating, Encoding-Decoding, and Reformatting Data Files It is our view that many application programmers' and systems analysts' views on program efficiency are unduly colored by early experience with primitive compilers and computer systems. As computers have become faster and as core have grown larger and cheaper, over-all man machine efficiency considerations often outweigh consideration of Optimum machine use. While these classical concerns are still important for long repetitive computer runs or for processing large files, they are really not important for a large fraction of the day to day Operations on a modern computer. Moreover, we have found that, for nonnumerical applications, on the whole, a special-purpose program written to solve a specific problem will be no simpler than a general-purpose program capable Of solving it and many other related although not identical problems. General-purpose programming is greatly facilitated by the use of subroutines of modular design. This resembles the construction Of a house from prefabricated parts. Just as certain kinds of wall or flooring components are common to buildings of very different design, certain types of subroutines are widely used in a variety of differing applications. Scientific programmers have largely recognized that the same matrix package may be used for both linear programming and quantum mechanics, and that it is not necessary to write two separate specialized program. Persons writing programs for such applications as file management, selective dissemination of information, information storage and retrieval, and text editing, on the other hand, have made minimal use of modular subroutines. Most of them have preferred to write their programs from scratch, much like a builder refusing to use prefab parts on the assumption they will be the wrong size or shape. We have found that in non-numerical file manipulation and information retrieval, modular subroutines can be as useful and as versatile as in scientific programming. For example, the substitute program, adapted as a subroutine, can be used for such varied jobs as report generation, correction of errors, and computer-assisted typesetting. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.