An introduction to Pascal programming for numerical computers.
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Date
1986-05
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Publisher
Australian Atomic Energy Commission
Abstract
These notes arose out of a series of Summer Schools conducted by the AAEC for Higher School Certificate students who were about to enter their final school year. The approach adopted avoids formalism and introduces quickly to the students sufficient programming concepts to enable them to undertake scientific problem solving with the help of tutorial sessions. The notes have been modified extensively so that the reader can work alone through this introduction, attempting exercises designed to build up programming and mathematical skills. The reader needs a knowledge of calculus to work through all the practice exercises; however, School Certificate mathematics is more than sufficient for understanding the expository sections. The examples and the orientation of the presentation are very much mathematical problems. There is no attempt to develop computer games writing skills since, in the author's opinion, more than enough material is available elsewhere. The Pascal programming language is extensive and contains many more facets than are considered here. These features involve more intricate and interesting aspects of data structures, most of which are not necessary for numerical scientific problem solving. Their omission is completely intentional to keep the volume of material presented suitable for a basic first course in computational computing. The students who work successfully through these notes should be able to come to terms with the other concepts by extending their reading (for this the student is referred to Welsh and Elder [1979]). The material presented here could also be programmed in other scientific computer languages such as FORTRAN or BASIC. The programming methodology with languages such as Pascal needed to achieve the same goal can be very different. Hopefully, the student who works through this presentation will be capable of thinking in a modern structured sense and not merely rewriting FORTRAN or BASIC concepts in Pascal.
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Keywords
Programming languages, AAEC, Differential calculus, Mathematical models, Programming languages
Citation
Barry, J. M. (1986). An introduction to pascal programming for numerical computations (AAEC/M105). Lucas Heights, N.S.W.: Australian Atomic Energy Commission Research Establishment, Lucas Heights Research Laboratories.