Saturday, November 05, 2005

The manuscripts of Edsger W. Dijkstra

These days I had to implement a semaphore synchronization object in C#. To note, Microsoft .NET 1.0 and 1.1 don't have such kind of synchronization primitive in contrast to the new version 2.0 where it is available. However, while I was looking for some guidelines for semaphore as a concept, I found out that this synchronization primitive was invented by one of the founders of modern Computer Sciences - the same Edsger Dijkstra - respect!!! During my bachelor's degree, I used to hate this guy because he has so many theorems that our professors insisted on knowing their proofs by heard :)

Despite this, I found an archive containing the manuscripts of Dijkstra, some of which are even hand-written - really impressive and somehow touching! If you want to see them just go here.

The one that particularly is about semaphores (and which is hand-written) can be seen here:

Enjoy!

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