Is it really a “law” of languages encompassing everything from human to monkey to DNA? Or is it just an empirical curiosity, of no more system-theoretic significance than, say, a spurious correlation?. But the empirical evidence is mounting that when we finally manage to create a theoretical structure within which to speak mathematically about complex systems, power laws like Zipf’s will appear...

The use of veri ers for proving the correctness of concrete programs is well known and has been amply described in the literature Here we focus on further perhaps more general tasks such veri ers can perform Given a program that is assumed to be correct we derive a set of axioms for the data structures involved In the simplest case we study an abstract program interchanging the contents of two ...

The purpose of this paper is to identify the factors that influence the decision to select a programming language to teach students enrolled in a graduate level course in education. The paper illustrates the experience of two degree programs: First, the master degree of business education (M.Ed.) at Eberly College of Business and Information Technology – Indiana University of Pennsylvania (IUP)...

We consider totally unimodular (TU) stochastic programs, that is, two-stage stochastic programs whose extensive-form constraint matrix is TU. We generalize the notion of total unimodularity to apply to sets of matrices and provide properties of such sets. We provide several sufficient conditions on stochastic programs to be TU. When solving TU stochastic problems using the L-shaped method, it i...

A uniform treatment is presented of specifications, programs, and programming for communicating processes with machine state. The treatment is based on addition of a specification statement to a CSP-like language. The extended language is viewed as a specification language in which programs are identified with a subclass of specifications. A semantics is provided and here a selection of sound r...