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The article presents computing survey's electronic symposium on the theory of computation. The 25th anniversary of the European Association for the Theoretical Computing Science (EATCS) was celebrated during the 24th session of the "International Colloquium on Automata, Languages and Programming (ICALP) Bologna, Italy, from July 7-11, 1997. More than 300 scientists participated in the conference and its satellite events. There were many stimulating discussing about the role of theory in computer science. Papers of the symposium are divided into subareas such as algorithms, analysis, concurrency, formal methods, syntax and semantics and complexity of cognitive models. Algorithms area includes papers on approximate algorithms, algorithm engineering and online algorithms. The analysis area includes papers on program analysis based on game semantics and on abstract interpretation. The two papers on the complexity of cognitive models deal with simulating free will and simulating the mind.

During the past ten years the Soviet Bloc has designed, developed, and put into production a series of upward-compatible third-generation computers known as the Unified System or Ryad. This family is effectively a reverse engineering of the IBM S/360 system. Although backward by current Western and Japanese standards, the Unified System is of considerable technological, political, and economic importance. This paper is an attempt to present a comprehensive survey and analysis of the Ryad project. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents the content of the June 1978 issue of the journal "ACM Computing Surveys." This issue's four papers share the theme of computer system engineering. The first paper gives us a much needed glimpse into the Soviet system of computers; the second describes successful approaches to keeping computer systems operating despite incorrect software and unreliable hardware; the third reveals the unseen world of error recovery in data management systems; and the fourth evaluates the state of software engineering. Since the days of the debate over structured programming, there has been much progress in understanding the engineering of large software systems. Recent studies have shown that the design and coding stages, wherein structured programming is most visible, constitute about 35% of the effort to ready a software product for delivery. These studies have also shown that the maintenance required to keep a software product operational after delivery typically amounts to 2/3 of the total cost of the product.