In compiling this list, I have been guided by just two criteria : the rather serious list I had before, and what happened to turn up when rummaging through my collection of stuff. Critical evaluation has not had much to do with it. On the other hand, on the way through life I've got rid of a lot of boring stuff, so there's been a selection process favouring things that I find interesting. There's not much fame here, but lots of fun.
Chemistry :
There were one or two, and some day I might get round to recording them here, but it isn't at the top of my list of priorities. If you really want to know, ask me.
Various manuals, instructions, developments; worthy, but for the most part sub-research.
Papers, reports, correspondence, etc.
Speculative, whimsical, but with some serious point. This includes my Sigplan Notices column, and one or two others.
Occasionally I have a giddy fit.
Comparatively informal documents in which I occasionally write down work I haven't finished. The topics are mainly to do with research activities. The category is listed here purely in the interests of completeness. The notes are of some nostalgic interest to me, and my future biographers will doubtless wade through them, but I don't think I'd recommend them to anyone else. Though there are one or two interesting bits ....
Chains linking items relating to specific topics.
The "rather serious list" - some of the same stuff, but with less weighty bits excised, in chronological order, and with fewer tedious comments.
This isn't nearly finished yet. Perhaps it will be, some day, but I'm not going to guarantee it. The immediate purpose is to get a list of all my stuff about rehabilitation, which I've done.
Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to work properly on all browsers. I don't know why; it works on some.
Rehabilitation list »
This is a programming manual for the Lilac language. Lilac was a Lisp-like language with reverse-Polish parenthesis-free syntax which implemented standard list operations head, tail, and cons. There was provision for saving values ( set ), literals, conditionals, primitive input and output, and some other things. It would probably have been a functional language if I'd known what that was.
Lilac depended strongly on a set of list-processing assembly language macros called CLIST - compare the macro implementation of SNOBOL, about which at the time I knew nothing. CLIST ran with the IBM 1130 assembler, and was seriously used by students for some time. It included a good set of list-processing operations, and a fully automatic garbage collector. Unfortunately all traces of CLIST appear to have disappeared, which is a pity.
A series of articles describing how to write a very simple compiler in Cobol. In the unlikely event of your wanting to read these, you can find them reproduced, more or less, in my technical report "on compilers and Steam".
This is an introduction to Cobol, presented as a tutorial to be used with the Stubol implementation. It was used for several years as the text for the Accountancy department's Cobol course.
A manual describing the operation of an assembler intended ( and used ) for teaching assembly language on the Alpha LSI minicomputer. ASPIC was unusual in that it incorporated a fairly conventional assembler and also an interpreter for the machine it ran on; as this machine was a stand-alone minicomputer without any backing store, the interpreter was a valuable insurance against crashes which were rather expensive in time. A programme could also be run with the real hardware.
This is an introduction to Basic, using the LSI-Basic interpreter written in the Computer Centre by Nevil Brownlee, Peter Fenwick, and me. This was used as a tutorial manual for Basic courses presented by the Computer Centre, the Mathematics department, and the Computer Science department.
After all those years spent slaving over a hot computer, it is a little sad that practically nothing of permanent value in presentable form remains. That's not for want of thinking about it; there just hasn't been a lot of time to write it down.
There might yet be an exception. Robert Sheehan and I have made an attempt to present our treatment of operating systems as a sort of textbook, and we continue to work at it. The original approach was hampered by negotiations with a publisher who temporised and procrastinated for about four years before deciding against publishing the book. During this time we had held off serious development on the material in case it turned out to be counterproductive in the long run; this strategy turned out to be counterproductive in the long run.
Now we're trying again, but finding that a thorough development of our principles is a lot harder than we'd expected. Do not watch this space - but wonderful things might yet happen.
Or then again. I don't remember when I wrote that, but now it's 2005 and I don't think I've touched the material for about four years. Robert has been busy with his PhD work, and the impetus for the book has gone. Perhaps the last gasp was Working Note AC131, in which I propose a universal structure for computing, or something of the sort.
I think that's sad. We had something to offer.
| #162 : | G.A. Creak and R. Sheehan : | A new structure for an operating systems course | December, 1999 |
Some research is more profound than some other research. Both sorts are here. One or two bits, particularly in the Computer Centre, are not much more than fairly straightforward programme development, but in most cases more than a little ingenuity was needed, and in all cases I learnt something.
| #2 | 1978 | The Stubol system | An error-correcting Cobol compiler for student use. |
| #8 | 1977 | Alans dictionary programs | Software used to construct a Maori dictionary. |
| #9 | 1977 | LSI/ASM | A cross-assembler for a minicomputer. |
| #11 | 1978 | Matching routines | Analysis of archaeological data. |
| #15 | 1979 | Thinking Small | Analyses the discussions of a group engaged on language design. |
| #16 | 1979 | On compilers and Steam | A simple compiler for a string-processing language. |
| #18 | 1980 | CROAK | An information storage and retrieval system. |
| #19 | 1980 | ASPARAGUS | A "compiler compiler". |
| #22 | 1984 | The Zeno system | A group project on an operating system interface. |
| #23 | 1984 | Analysing voting records | Analysis of voting patterns in local body elections. |
This documentation for a set of programmes intended to maintain a library catalogue is notable for only two reasons.
Well, it seemed good at the time.
| #42 : | G.A. Creak : | The Stream utilities manual. | January, 1990 | |
| #43 : | R. Chew and G.A. Creak : | The Resource techniques : tools for intelligent systems. | January, 1990 | |
| #46 : | G.A. Creak : | A view of rehabilitation computing. | August, 1990 | Rehabilitation list 1 » |
| #47 : | G.A. Creak : | The adaptive peripheral : a teachable interface based on a neural network. | August, 1990 | Rehabilitation list 2 » |
| #52 : | G.A. Creak : | Information structures in manufacturing processes. | February, 1991 | |
| #54 : | G.A. Creak and Robert Sheehan : | The representation of information in rehabilitation computing. | July, 1991 | Rehabilitation list 4 » |
| #55 : | G.A. Creak and Roy Davies : | A discussion moderator. | August, 1991 | |
| #60 : | G.A. Creak and H.-W. Gellersen : | An adaptive machine access system for the handicapped based on neural networks. | May, 1992 | Rehabilitation list 5 » |
| #93 : | G.A. Creak : | Essay on a multichannel computer interface for people with physical disabilities. | June, 1994 | Rehabilitation list 8 » |
| #104 : | G.A. Creak and R. Kay : | PFL and PDL : two languages for process control | December, 1994 | |
| #162 : | G.A. Creak and R. Sheehan : | A new structure for an operating systems course | December, 1999 | |
| #169 : | G.A. Creak : | Artificial intelligence - or not ? | December, 1999 |
Sigplan Notices 24#8, 7 ( August 1989 ) : ( on the result statement in Small ).
Computer Bulletin Series 4 3#1, 27 ( February 1991 ) : "To see or not to see ?" ( my sole contribution to computer graphics ).
Communicating Together
17#1, 23 ( "Spring" 2000 ) : ( on the possibility of
acquiring language from sentences ).
Rehabilitation list 15 »
IEEE Engineering in Medicine and Biology Magazine
19#5, 8 ( September/October 2000 ) : "Alphabet Soup" ( "Hieroglyphics" - in fact, "smileys" - as a spontaneous extension of English ).
Rehabilitation list 16 »
Communications of the ACM
44#11, 13-15 ( November 2001 ) : "Special needs and sound scholarship" ( The importance of rehabilitation computing as an extreme case in developing a "science" of computing ).
Rehabilitation list 17 »
Or reflective but entertaining.
#75 ( 2003 January - really 2004 March );
#76 ( 2003 June - really 2004 September ).
- at which point "Sigcaph Newsletter" changed into "Accessibility and Computing", so -
#79 ( 2004 June - really 2004 November ).
( The "really" bits in the two lists above are there because, while the newsletters were published on the "really" dates, we had to label them with the other dates which were the official dates of publication, mainly to satisfy US postage regulations : ACM paid for delivery of three issues per year, so that's what they had to be called, even if they did turn up a couple of years late. )
Well, I think they're funny, anyway. Or I did when I sent them off.
Sigplan Notices 21#4, 20 ( April, 1986 ) : ( on flies, on garbage, on flies on garbage, and on garbage on flies ).
Go to
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forgotten );
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Computer Science.