MICROPROGRAMMING TREND CONSIDERED DANGEROUS M.M. Lehman Imperial College of Science and Technology 48 Prince Gardens London SW7 ILU, England When first conceived by Wilkes and his Cambridge colleagues, the concepts of microprogramming were a valuable extension and formalization of the more heuristic, function-by-function, logicprocess which had previously been used to design and implement computers using elementary electronic and logical components and circuits. As such, I have no quarrel either with the concept or its implementation. In recent years, however, the concept has been advanced (?) through the development of the control store facility. Thus the development and maintenance process for micro-code will increasingly resemble that of systems and applications programs. And therein lies mortal danger. The problems of programming are now widely acknowledged. This is seen from the spreading interest in, indeed anxious emphasis on, software engineering, high-level languages, structured programming, software quality, program evolution dynamics, and so on. Programs must continuously and inevitably be modified, repaired, enhanced (I). As this is done, program quality (performance, reliability, and changeability, for example), structure, intelligibility, and maintainability equally inevitably degrade. In the end a program becomes obsolete and must be replaced. Micro-code will be equally sensitive to changes in the
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Microprogramming trend considered dangerous
Lehman, M. M.
Follow ACM SIGMICRO Newsletter
, Volume 6 (3)
Association for Computing Machinery – Sep 1, 1975
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