April 27, 2012
In their 1973 paper “The Early Development of Programming Languages,” Luis Trabb Pardo and Donald Knuth give the following algorithm as a means of assessing programming languages:
ask for 11 numbers to be read into a sequence S
reverse sequence S
for each item in sequence S
call a function to do an operation
if result overflows
Though it is trivial, the algorithm involves arrays, indexing, mathematical functions, subroutines, I/O, conditionals and iteration, and thus exposes many basic operations of a programming language.
Your task is to write a program that implements the Trabb Pardo Knuth algorithm. When you are finished, you are welcome to read or run a suggested solution, or to post your own solution or discuss the exercise in the comments below.