Stacks and Trees and Strings and Bits and Pieces

This report comprises a collection of short papers on divers programming techniques which I have stumbled on over the past twenty years while working on the experimental operating system EM-YMS.

The word "paper" is perhaps pretentious, and I use it only for want of a better word. By no means all of the items are suitable for publication in scientific journals. One reason for assembling them here is to place the ideas in the ''public domain". This is intended to dissuade anyone who might independently discover the same techniques from attempting to obtain patents for them.

Several of the papers explicitly note that the work was done jointly with one or two other people. All the work reported here has however benefitted from long-term collaboration, both formal and informal, with some very talented colleagues at IBM Research -- particularly Walter Daniels, Michel Hack, Paul Kosinski (now at Digital Equipment Corporation), and Gerald Spivak.

Although one motivation for producing this report is to protect the ideas in it, I hope it may also make enjoyable reading. Regard it as a collection of short stories.

By the way, I use first and second person pronouns in the following way. The first person singular refers to me the writer; the second person (plural) refers to you the reader; and the first person plural refers to the fleeting collaboratlon that exists between us.