Electronic Data Processing for the International Vocabulary of Terms used in Information Processing

The vocabulary of terms used in information processing that has been prepared under the joint auspices of the International Federation for Information Processing and the International Computation Centre and which is about to be published has been described in the paper by Gould & Tootill (1965)f. The British contribution to this work was made through the glossary committee of The British Computer Society; the committee also took a major part of the responsibility for editing. As the work progressed it was realized that the lack of an up-to-date index, which could readily be modified as changes were incorporated, was holding up the work. It was not easy to follow the cross references and ensure compatibility, and even harder to check that the definitions did not form loops. An example of the latter is that it is too easy to define PROGRAM in terms of INSTRUCTIONS and INSTRUCTION in terms of PROGRAM. Since this was a data-processing committee it was clear that dataprocessing techniques should be used to overcome these difficulties. The program and computer used had to be such that the programming would not be difficult, the amount of labour required should be reasonable and the work had to be done on a computer readily available to at least one member of the committee. These restrictions arise from the fact that the committee was staffed by voluntary labour, as is the usual case with B.C.S. committees. The programs were successfully written for a scientific computer, Mercury, in a scientific language with little difficulty, and ran successfully. It was particularly interesting to find that techniques that would normally be considered to belong to the commercial field were readily programmed in a scientific language and successful object programs obtained in two or three weeks of spare-time work.