HFM2019
History of Formal Methods Workshop
Alexandra Vidal, Ana Sandra Meneses & António Sousa
From manuscripts to programming languages: an archivist perspective
This contribution aims to present an archival study carried out in the Braga District Archives (ADB) of a fund related to the activity of Professor Willem van der Poel as Chairman of IFIP Working Group 2.1. This fund was entrusted to ADB in late 2017, via a protocol with IFIP WG 2.1.
The material spans over a period of time which, starting in the second half of the twentieth century, witnesses significant advances in computer programming as a scientific body of knowledge: the spread of the Algol family of programming languages. For archivists with little background in computer programming, handing this fund was a challenging exercise. The archival process that gave on-line access to this collection [1] ranged from treatment of the documentation itself to its archival formal description and digital preservation (document scanning).
The formal description followed two international standards: the General International Standard Archival Description [2]; the International Standard Archival Authority Record for Corporate Bodies, Persons and Families [3]. Both are issued by the International Council on Archives (ICA).
These standards are very important for archival description, normalization and dissemination because they rely on scientific procedures which, in this particular exercise, unveiled not only the organic aspects of IFIP, of its Technical Committee TC2 and the WG 2.1 group, but also the relationship between such institutions and main protagonists such as Heinz Zemanek, Nikolas Wirth, and several others. In particular, the idea of "assigning meanings to programs" arises in letters and other documents circulating within the group in the mid-1960s, thus already contributing to the body of knowledge today known as "formal methods".
Altogether, the authors intend to demonstrate how normalized archival procedures can help in laying out the historiography of the origins of programming science and formal methods, through the careful identification of document archival series such as meeting minutes, meeting processes, correspondence, proposals, technical notes, reports, resolutions, management support documents, news in newspapers, and so on.
We would like also to discuss how to interface ADB’s Willem van der Poel's fund with other collections, namely the Software Preservation Project, the Brian Randell Collection (Newcastle, UK) and Andrei Ershov (web) archives.
Last but not least, the authors would like to raise the issue of digital preservation. Nowadays, IFIP WG2.1 information and work-flow don’t rely on physical paper anymore. What are the challenges in preserving the last (say) 20 years’ bulk of emails, text source files (written in a myriad of different, constant evolving editors), PDF (and also PS) files, websites and so on, when compared to the “classic” archival techniques applied to van der Poel’s collection? How “trustful” is a mailbox file stored in a personal computer compared to a folder of yellowish papers? Moreover, can archival standards and principles be applied to software itself? In the parallel, programming languages such as Algol can perhaps be compared to Latin: a language that open-sourced others through a process of transformation and refinement, leaving its marks there.
From manuscripts to programming languages_PPT.pptx